We have done pretty much everything real estate-adjacent.
Between the two of us, we have sold over three thousand homes, bought multifamilies, bid at foreclosure auctions, picked up properties that the sheriff boarded up.
We have done commercial. We have flipped homes.
We have done the big team, the weekend programs, the late nights studying spreadsheets.
If it had anything to do with real estate, we tried it.
And we loved it. We genuinely loved it.
But at some point, and if you have been a landlord for any length of time, you know exactly what we mean… It got noisy.
The Noise Nobody Talks About
When people think about investing in real estate, they picture the upside. The equity, the cash flow, the wealth, you know, the fun stuff. And that part is real. Real estate is still how most people in America become millionaires.
We still believe that with everything in us.
What most people don’t picture is the septic tank overflowing at 2 a.m. Right after the roof leaks and the toilet that won’t stop running. In between, the tenant who stopped paying because they lost their job and didn’t know what to do, so they just went silent.
That’s the noise in Real Estate, and it is relentless.
We were also doing something that, looking back, made no sense at all. We were spending every single day working in real estate — it was our expertise, our passion, the thing we knew better than almost anything — and then we were taking our money and handing it to someone else to put in the stock market.
When a stock went up, we didn’t really know why. When it went down, we definitely didn’t know why. We were outsourcing our financial future to an asset class we didn’t understand, while sitting on top of an asset class we knew inside and out.
We finally looked at each other and said: Why aren’t we investing in what we believe in? In what we do every day?
The Light Bulb Moment
That question changed everything.
We started digging deeper into the real estate space. And that’s when we discovered something that, honestly, felt like a cheat code once we understood it.
When you think about a real estate transaction, any transaction, there are two main players. The property owner and the lender.
The person who owns the building and the bank that holds the mortgage.
In case nobody told you, of those two, the lender has the least amount of risk.
Think about that for a second. The property owner deals with the tenants, the maintenance, the market fluctuations, the insurance increases, the property tax hikes.
The lender? The lender just gets paid. Every month. Principal and interest.
And if the borrower stops paying? The lender takes the house back. The collateral was there the whole time.
The light bulb went off. We could still invest in real estate — the area we know and trust — but be in the most conservative, best-collateralized position in the entire transaction.
This time, not as the property owner but as the owner of the note on that property.
We could generate powerful cash flow without all the noise.
What That Actually Means
Here is the simplest way to explain what we do now.
When someone buys a house, they go to Wells Fargo or Bank of America or US Bank and get a mortgage. That bank is now in first position, meaning the house is their collateral. If the borrower stops paying, the bank can take the house back.
We do the same thing. We purchase those first position mortgage notes.
We become the bank.
You have probably gotten a letter in the mail at some point that says: “Please stop making your payments to Wells Fargo. Going forward, make them out to Mr. Cooper.” You typically get that kind of letter when the bank has sold the note. That is exactly what we do. We buy those notes, we hold them with a professional servicer, and our investors receive the monthly payments.
The tenants do not call the bank when they have a toilet issue.
That sentence alone is why we made the switch.
Slow and Steady Wins
Here is the other thing we have learned after decades in this business: you do not need to chase % returns to build life-changing wealth.
If you just parked money in an asset that yielded 7%, 8%, 9% a year — and you didn’t touch it — over 10, 15, 20 years, that is transformational money.
It’s the tortoise and the hare. And we are perfectly fine being the tortoise.
There is something deeply powerful about money that works for you without you lifting a finger. No phone calls. No maintenance requests. No eviction proceedings.
Just the ACH deposit landing in your account every month like clockwork.
That is the definition of truly quiet passive investing.
Who This Is For
One of the first people we ever put into a mortgage note was Stacey’s mom. She was 84 years old. She understood real estate — she understood that is how most people in America build wealth. But she had no interest in being a landlord. She just wanted her money working for her, safely, in an asset she understood.
That is who this is for.
If you have built something — a business, a career — and you are looking for a place to put that capital that gives you real returns without demanding your time, without the noise, without the midnight calls, mortgage note investing might be the most important thing you learn this year.
We spent almost 20 years doing it the hard way before we found the smarter path. We are here to help you skip that part.
Kendra Todd and Stacey Brower are the founders of Passive Note Investor, a private mortgage note investment firm. With nearly 20 years of real estate experience and over 3,000 homes sold, they now help investors generate passive income through first-position mortgage notes.
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