PROFILE
F
ar-removed from the hustle and bustle of 5th Avenue and the sandy chaos of Santa Monica, sibling duo Bill Fairman and Wendy Sweet’s company Carolina Capital Management serves the financial needs of investors in North & South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, and some areas of Florida.
While some firms focus on dominating the hard money field on a nation-wide level, Fairman said Carolina is content with focusing on the company’s ‘backyard,’ providing the best service possible to the clientele he knows best. Carolina’s website states that they serve real estate investors and ‘small builders,’ or those who are striving to build wealth and generate income. Although Fairman is the first to admit that he hasn’t spent the majority of his career in the private and hard money space, he said the experience he has garnered throughout the first half-decade of Carolina Capital Management’s existence has been invaluable. Fairman also said his former job as a loan officer did prepare him for the ‘private money world,’ and he sat down with Originate Report to discuss his career, working with his sister, and future trends in the hard money space. Originate Report (OR:) How did you get involved in the private money sphere? Were hard money loans always on your radar as a viable career path? Bill Fairman (BF:) Well, I have a 30-year mortgage history behind me – I started off as a loan officer in a small broker shop, and then moved onto the wholesale side of the business, where I was calling on other brokerage shops. Back in ‘those days,’ whoever had the larger line of credit was the larger lender; when we started off, we didn’t have the largest line of credit. I worked for the same mortgage company for 11 years which is somewhat unheard of, and then I worked for several wholesale lenders, and my last step in that journey was working for a small balance commercial wholesale lender, and that was right before the Stock Market crash of 2008-9. Before the crash when I was working for that wholesaler, we would hold half-day seminars on how to underwrite or originate commercial loans so they could utilize that additional revenue stream; we still do that today at Carolina Capital Management.
Bill Fairman of Carolina Capital Management Keeps the Focus Local By Charles Peckman, Originate Report
6 Originate Report | June 2019
What got me into the hard money space was after the crash, I got out of the mortgage business completely; I was very bitter that 30 years in the industry could shrink almost overnight. But my sister, Wendy, who was also in the mortgage business, dragged me back – I did a few commercial jobs and audio/video integration, but as Wendy explained, there was a need for financing for small businesses; as you know, the banks pulled out of that space after the crash, but it wasn’t their fault, it was the fault of the regulators who limited what they could do. We saw that there was a need in that space for small businesses and small contractors, in that they didn’t have the money to fix properties. Wendy was involved with folks who had money in small IRA accounts, and they wanted to get a higher return on their money; she also knew people that needed money and people who wanted more money – that’s how we got started; frankly, hard money and private money is similar to being in the insurance industry, because it’s all about assessing risk. It wasn’t a big jump from conventional financing to private lending. OR: Did that transition play a significant role in the formation of Carolina Capital Management? BF: Well, it’s kind of a funny story – when we started this, it was easy for someone to cut a check for $50,000. But as the business grew and people wanted bigger margins, there was also more that came with that – when we
