ABOUT
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I invest my own money along with my investors in private real estate loans.
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30+ years of real estate experience including founding, operating, and selling a mortgage brokerage company.
After investing my personal funds in real estate loans with several different private money loan brokers since 2017, I decided to start my own private money lending company for many reasons. First, I really enjoy the entire process of helping people accomplish their financial goals. I have also had great success and found it both personally and financially rewarding. Second, over decades I have had many colleagues who have invested with me in loans, real estate partnerships, and other private companies. I have been approached by more colleagues who would like to invest in private money loans with me. Third, it allows me to actively work on finding the types of loans that appeal to me as a private investor. Since I generate a return on my own investment funds in the loans I am able to charge lower points to borrowers, giving me a competitive advantage to attract borrowers.
Russell Hyzen
PRINCIPAL
DRE Broker #01022829
BACKGROUND
After graduating from California State University, Northridge with a double major in finance and real estate I went to work for a real estate development company that built about 300 apartment units per year. I then sold commercial real estate before entering the mortgage lending business, working for two mortgage brokerage companies before starting my own. After founding, operating, and selling my own mortgage brokerage company I changed course and joined an early-stage Internet company as the fifth employee back in 1995. This company, Quote.com, was the first company to provide stock quotes on the Internet. We were founded by legendary venture capitalist, Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital. Mike and Sequoia invested in Yahoo! a few months earlier and Mike brokered a meeting I was at between Quote.com and Yahoo!, which at the time had only 15 employees.
In 1996 I joined the two co-founders of XOOM.com as their first employee. At XOOM.com we built a community website in the same pier group as GeoCities, The Globe, Tripod, Angelfire, etc. These were the first iterations of social media which would eventually produce companies like MySpace and Facebook. We used our community website to direct market products to our member base and also sold advertising on our high-traffic website. We were able to take the company public in December of 1998 and then do a merger that combined XOOM.com, Snap!, NBC.com, and other web properties to create NBCi.
After XOOM.com/NBCi I started investing in apartment buildings with colleagues from the first real estate company I worked for after college. I also invested in several Internet startups, joined some of the boards of directors of these companies and even took an operating role at one of them. After we sold the company at which I was on the board and also had an operating role, I focused on my real estate investing in apartment buildings and started to invest in private money loans.