In this episode of the BigMikeFund Podcast, host Mike Zlotnik (Big Mike) sits down with real estate powerhouse Chris Prefontaine, Chairman and Founder of Smart Real Estate Coach®. Chris is a 4x best-selling author, Forbes Business Council Member, and a 3-time Inc. 5000 Honoree who has led one of the nation’s fastest-growing companies. With more than three decades of experience and hundreds of creative-finance real estate transactions under his belt, Chris has built a thriving community that empowers investors to succeed in any market.
Mike and Chris dive deep into the world of creative real estate, exploring how Chris rebuilt his business after the 2008 crash and why strategies like lease-purchase, owner financing, and subject-to deals remain powerful tools for today’s investors. Chris explains how his “buying on terms” approach works in both residential and commercial markets, why many sellers prefer creative structures over traditional cash offers, and how he and his family continue to complete deals weekly—while coaching students across 80+ markets to do the same.
They also discuss the importance of mentorship, real-world deal support, and proper expectations for long-term success. Chris shares how the Wicked Smart Community helps investors avoid common pitfalls, accelerate learning through hands-on deal flow, and build credibility through unique certifications.
Whether you’re new to creative real estate or looking to sharpen your strategy, this conversation offers practical insights, mindset shifts, and a clear look at how to thrive in any economic climate.
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE EPISODE
00:00 – Welcome to the BigMikeFund Podcast
0:53 – Chris’s Background
1:17 – Chris’s Credentials & Wicked Smart Community
3:11 – Creative Real Estate After the 2008 Crash
4:45 – Lease Purchase, Owner Financing & Subject-To Explained
5:55 – Creative Finance in Commercial Transactions
6:10 – Recent Creative Finance Deal Example
8:59 – Principal-Only Payments & Deal Structure
9:43 – Creative Financing in Various Asset Classes
9:48 – How Students Work with Chris & His Team
10:59 – Coaching Model, Deal Review & Support System
12:44 – Certification & Credibility in Seller Conversations
13:31 – How to Reach Chris | Free Resources
14:54 – Current Market Conditions & 2025 Real Estate Environment
15:37 – AI, Technology & Faster Deal Analysis
17:22 – Modeling Success & Learning Through Technology
18:49 – AI Tools for Real Estate Due Diligence
19:30 – Integrated Tech Stack for Real Estate Students
21:40 – Scalability & Local Execution
21:52 – Recommended Podcasts
22:19 – Recommended Books
23:01 – Closing Thoughts
If you found this episode substantial and want to dig deeper into real estate, or maybe you want to discover better investment opportunities, be sure to check out www.tempofunding.com.
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Full Transcript:
Mike Zlotnik (00:02.334)
Welcome to the Big Mike Fund podcast on the Big Mike Mike Zlatnik. It is my pleasure and a privilege to welcome Chris Prefrontaine. Hey Chris.
Chris Prefontaine (00:11.618)
Hey, my kawaii.
Mike Zlotnik (00:13.802)
Thanks for coming on the podcast. Appreciate you being here. You’re sort of a neighbor, a Northeastern neighbor. You are in Rhode Island. Would you be so kind as to tell folks a little bit about you, family, and then we’ll get into real estate and business.
Chris Prefontaine (00:28.418)
Yeah, yeah, so I’ve been, well, I’ll start with I’ve been married 39 years this year, man, man. So thank you, we met in middle school. So that’s an interesting journey we had. I’ve got two grandkids now, which is part of my why to create some really cool family experiences. And yes, I do live in Newport, Rhode Island for everybody to get a sense for how close to you.
Mike Zlotnik (00:34.056)
God bless.
Chris Prefontaine (00:52.238)
I’ve been in real estate now 34 years, so there’s a lot to unpack. We can pick the high points, whatever you want to pick my brain on.
Mike Zlotnik (00:59.838)
Yeah, appreciate the info. I’m going to read actually the intro. Chris is a chairman and founder of the smart real estate coach. Is a Forex bestselling offer. Forth business council member. Three times Inc 5000 honoree and it’s a long list of accomplishments and you have a community called wicked smart community to complete you. guided it to complete.
Hundreds of real estate transactions in North America. again, welcome to the podcast and I love Rhode Island. I’ve been many times in Rhode Island. One of my girls is a professional figure skater. She competes often in Boston and sometimes we’ve had competitions in Rhode Island at Providence and it’s very cool. I love
Chris Prefontaine (01:32.344)
Thank you.
Chris Prefontaine (01:42.093)
nice.
Mike Zlotnik (01:50.033)
Rhode Island to come to the mentions, right? It’s so cool. I’m sure you’ve been there many many times just it’s a it’s a unique place where you could see the vendor builds and the getties and all the the old American I guess it was 19th century wealthiest and beginning of 20th century wealthiest Americans
Chris Prefontaine (02:11.394)
Yeah, there’s a house that’s been being rehabbed for probably five years now along Bellevue Ave or all those mansions that you’re talking about that’s being done by Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle. It is just, I don’t know how long it’s been going, probably more than five years. Crazy, millions of dollars.
Mike Zlotnik (02:30.024)
Yeah, those things are stunning and for the audience who haven’t been there, it’s a great place to visit. It’s beautiful, especially warm part of the season when the weather is nice. It’s a great vacation spot. All right. So let’s switch to real estate. Let’s talk a little bit about your coaching. Let’s talk a little bit about how you helped folks to do hundreds of transactions. Is it residential, commercial? Take us through.
Chris Prefontaine (02:54.018)
Well, it’s creative real estate. So let me answer that by saying a few things, Mike, thank you. So creative real estate, because after the 2008 crash, I was annihilated financially in every other way, right? Financially, mentally, et cetera. But it took me a while to get out of my own way. But once I did, 2012, I said, if I’m gonna get back in the game, which my wife encouraged me to, how am I gonna do that? I had no credit.
I was living in a one bedroom apartment. I had no money, certainly. So I wasn’t bankable. So I started buying things, what I call on terms, but it’s creative real estate. It’s been around. You talked about Bellevue and the wealthy people back then. Well, if you read the old, there’s an old Carnegie book I read that they talked about buying real estate on terms before banking. they called it master lease purchase. We call it lease purchase right now in the residential world, but also owner financing. So it’s not new.
It’s just that I said, okay, I can’t buy unless I do that. So I buy that way. I buy lease purchase, financing and subject to existing financing. And then organically, people started asking me to show them how to do that. That was way back at like 13 or 14. And now fast forward, you know, we’re in 80 markets doing deals with students. Why? Because we’re not just selling something like we go, okay, you want to come on and learn this? We’re going to do deals with you. Like we’re not partners. It’s your deal.
but we’re gonna revenue share with you so we have a vested interest in seeing you to the finish line. And so to this day, we still buy as a family, my son and I, my son-in-law, Zach, who also a part of Wicked Smart, we buy homes every single week, every single month, and then we teach it to the community as well, again, in those 80 markets and growing. So it’s pretty neat. So it’s all what I call interactive, hands-on approach.
Mike Zlotnik (04:41.316)
Yeah, this is very cool and this creative finances by the way is true in Residential and commercial I’ve seen it done a lot easier to do it in residential because you don’t have very sophisticated Owners, but I’ve seen it done in commercial too in terms when I literally had guests and I had conversations guest on a podcast and conversations with other Investors who literally say hey you can give a three offer
Chris Prefontaine (04:48.982)
Any aspect. Yeah.
Mike Zlotnik (05:10.126)
If somebody’s selling a property, they need to sell this. There’s a reason they’re selling the property. It’s listed. You could always come and make three offers. You can make an offer cash, could be low ball offer. You can make an offer with some, you know, traditional financing. You can make an offer on terms where, just like you, you, you said. You as the buyer don’t need to bring a lot of cash to the table. You don’t need bank financing, but you, you, you give the owner what it feels like a better price, right?
But because of a term, you’re actually winning more than if they took a cash offer. So give us an example of what you’ve done recently. Something along these lines on kind of creative finance. Something that kind of stands out in your memory.
Chris Prefontaine (05:50.243)
Yeah. I have one on my desk. Yeah, I have one on my desk right now, Mike. And to your point, any asset class you can do, right? People do it with boats and planes. So you can do it with anything. I literally, here’s the, I have this file on my desk because I’m working on a particular deal that is local here. And tonight on our mastermind call, I’m going to outline it. Here’s the deal. It came from a for sale by owner. So they weren’t selling on their own. She’s overpriced. That’s why it wasn’t selling. I said to her, look,
Anyone trying to get financing on this is not going to get financing. It’s not going to appraise out. I’m on your team. I don’t make up the numbers. They are what they are. So I offered her, she was asking like 820. I offered her 780 grand. She’s free and clear. So here’s the structure. That’s who I like to speak with, free and clear owners, no mortgage. 780 grand, 10 year owner financing, monthly payments of $1,670 principle only. That’s the key.
because how we exit is very important, but anyone doing that deal with that heavy of a principal pay down, all of it, every month, puts themselves in a really good position. It’s sort of a recession hedge, if you will. Now we parlay that into much bigger numbers the way we exit, but that’s a simple, simple structure that we use all the time. No money down, however, we will pay her transfer tax and any other fees because you can’t expect these cells to take no money down and then come out of pocket. Now,
Why would they take that? People go, well, how do you convince these, you don’t convince them to your point. They’re getting a little better price. She cannot, cannot, cannot get that on the open market. And if she did get it by luck, it wouldn’t appraise. I know that. And so that’s why she is incentivized to work with us. We bought our commercial building that same way I just described. Now I did put a little money down on our commercial building because it’s for our own businesses. And I wanted to get in that building. But it was also a very creative deal.
because the owner wanted for trust in estate planning reasons and tax reasons, did not want a cash sale. He had offers at full price cash, didn’t want them. So you’re just gonna look at what is their problem or goal they’re trying to accomplish that the conventional market can’t and solve for that. You’re never convincing. So I diverted a little bit with two deals there, but just so had an idea.
Mike Zlotnik (08:08.776)
Yeah, that’s very powerful. You basically it’s kind of rent to own essentially, especially if you have no money down, you you have a contract that’s multi-year and not even paying interest. You’re just paying the principal, right? So.
Chris Prefontaine (08:21.772)
Yeah, on the building we had a, he was very sophisticated. He’s one of the largest landowners. So he said, what do mean no principal? So we did, I mean, no interest. We did principal for 18 months and then we converted it to a note that he liked, but still we got 18 months of no principal on a commercial building. On the houses we get, we stay with principal the whole way usually.
Mike Zlotnik (08:41.084)
Yeah, it requires an Excel spreadsheet and some creative thinking, but at the end of the day, if you can manage the payments, right, and you could turn the asset into a productive cash flow and you don’t have much cash out of pocket, it’s an immediate win-win, and you’re very downside protected in essence. So yeah, I love it. It’s just a very creative way to acquire anything. Even with
Interestingly enough, self-storage facilities and some multifamily assets. It’s a function of if there’s equity left on the deal, right? If it’s an old owner and they’ve owned the property for long time, they have very little debt. You could even do a wrap if they have a mortgage payment. So, I mean, that’s a phenomenal way to basically approach this. So, how do you, and you said you’re working with your students. They’re basically finding deals. They bring it to you.
You help negotiate because of your experience, which is really important. Some people teach how to negotiate and it’s way better in my view. you tell me, maybe, you know, know better. It’s to be, to get really good at something. If somebody is really good at finding deals, but they’re not a master negotiator, and they work with you or anyone else who is a master at that. It’s better to do it this way because learning every skill and be a jack of all trades is harder.
than being sort of a specialist. And maybe one day people actually learn enough of it and they can just do all of it on their own. But having a big brother, whatever you want to call it, helps. A lot of people don’t even realize real estate is a team sport. So because it’s a team sport, having great team members really helps overall success. So any quick comments on the work with students and…
Chris Prefontaine (10:30.777)
Well, I
Mike Zlotnik (10:34.346)
Do you have a mastermind community? How people kind of like they work with you. They join a community and you basically just do them off the calls, live events. Just curious.
Chris Prefontaine (10:43.887)
Yeah, yeah. So to your earlier point, now the answer to how they work, if you look at the biggest mistakes real estate investors make and it causes them to jump to like another niche, another shiny object constantly, right? It’s a couple of things. One mismanaged expectations because unlike us, you get people screaming at you on social media that get rich quick tomorrow, right? So then they don’t get rich quick tomorrow. They don’t do it in 10 days. And then they think they stink at it, but it’s not them. It’s just the mismanaged expectations. Second one is
lack of that interactive model that you just described the way we work. You just kind of reiterated it at all. They get a deal, they bring it to us, yes, but while they’re having our help, our credibility, our scripting, they’re learning it. And so they’re not with us forever. So this transitions into how they work with us. There’s group coaching with us for 90 days. There’s one-on-one coaching. There’s different experience levels with us, 18 months, 24 months, 36 months. But after that, most of them,
either become coaches because they love it and they’re proficient or they go off and do their own thing and they’re fine. They don’t need us for life. That’s the whole idea here. The interactive is like fast forward learning versus take a course. If they sound nice and fluffy or take a seminar sounds nice and flowery and fluffy, go out to the real world. man, I didn’t know this happened. Well, that’s where we come in. And then we do everybody that goes through our basic Academy, Mike gets certified with the creative financing real estate association.
That goes so far on a phone call with a seller that says, yeah, I just got a few other calls from investors. Oh really, are they accredited or certified, depending on what level they’re with us, with the Creative Financing Real Estate Association. That’s huge, it’s credibility. So they have us on their shoulder and they have that credibility. It’s a big difference.
Mike Zlotnik (12:28.466)
Yeah, I absolutely, admire continuous learning and and this is the most difficult part people Yeah, they pay money to theoretically learn and then they go on their own and then they they run into whatever challenges and They switch to a different strategy. They go to a different guru, but it’s really the the the system the system is not working for them You could they can switch 20 times. They’re still not gonna not gonna be able to do it and life is a
Basically, it’s a lifelong adventure and learning journey, right? If think about it. And the support makes a lot of sense. I do like certification too. It’s kind of when you’re talking to the owner of the property and you give them some of your accolades or credentials helps. So how people reach out. I mean, we’ll continue the discussion, but I’ll give you a chance to talk about what’s a website, how do folks…
Chris Prefontaine (13:21.239)
I appreciate that. Our main website is smartrealestatecoach.com. I do have a gift for all your listeners, your tribe. They can get two of my best-selling books and we’ll throw some other goodies in there. Just go to wicketsmartbooks.com, wicketsmartbooks.com forward slash tempo. So I know it’s from your tribe. wanna make sure, especially cause your listeners are probably all over the place, but I wanna make sure we give them that gift. And by the way, it’s not Mike.
one of those free book offers that says free book and then you go in and you gotta put in eight bucks or six bucks or 10 bucks for shipping. This is free, you will not be asked for 10 cents, we just need your address and we’ll get it out to you. So wicketsmartbooks.com forward slash tempo. The other way they can do it, I’m big on free if you haven’t been able to tell, because I want people to not go out to all these other shiny objects. I want them to look into ours for free, creative real estate, and then if this is for you, great, then we can explore other options. So the other free option is,
Go to my free class, it’s like 30 minutes. You watch it, you’re a leisure, nobody’s on your back. that’s at smartrealestatecoach.com forward slash masters class. That’s it, that’s all yours for free.
Mike Zlotnik (14:31.274)
Yeah, I appreciate you sharing those websites and appreciate the free books. Now, let’s continue the discussion.
So we’re now in the late part of 2025. What’s different now versus the past? Some of these techniques are profound fundamentals. They last the test of time. But what’s new interesting now? I just want to hear from your observation. What do you see happening right now in the world the way we are with Trumponomics, tariffs, depreciation coming back, 100 % bonus?
Anything else you kind of happening out there you see any new interesting opportunities anything different kind of like What’s new and exciting today in this world?
Chris Prefontaine (15:16.399)
Let’s go a few things. Yeah, let’s go a few things. Not any priority order. One is what comes to mind is the speed of which we can do deals now, and that includes learning because of technology. Give you a quick example. We just took a basic thing that we all have to do, which is getting comparables before we buy a house, right? Or a building or whatever. Well, now you go to Grok, there’s many other ways to do it, but you go to grok.ia, you will get a amazing
Comparable analysis like that snap of a finger or as we said
Mike Zlotnik (15:49.995)
Hold the horses. Hold the horses. Are you saying that AI tools actually have gotten really good at the valuation models? They can give you a comps and valuation of a property and you can you could prompt them Hey, I’m a opportunistic bar looking to make a great deal find great property Here is address of the property find me the comps and it will just literally one of these like grog Will will give you the data?
Chris Prefontaine (15:59.761)
Crazy accurate.
Chris Prefontaine (16:11.92)
Yep. GR okay. Yeah. It’s so, so try that. There’s a little nugget for everybody, but that’s all technology, right? That’s, that’s one thing. Second thing is because of the internet, is lightning speed now for us to go, okay, well, I want to get good at, let’s just pick creative. I want to get good at creative real estate. I have this going on in my life. Why don’t I simply with the beauty of the, the, and a finger’s touch the internet.
Why don’t I find someone that’s in that exact same spot or was rather earlier in life and they’ve accomplished X and that’s what I want. I want that picture over there. Okay. Then just go model after that. I had a gentleman on my podcast, Quick Story, who David Nurse, who coaches NBA basketball players. These guys come out of college making 10, 20 million. And he said, Chris, what we do is we go look for someone that we’re looking for that particular behavior on YouTube. Everybody can do this. And then they model after that and he coaches them.
This is not brain science. So you got the technology, you got the ease of finding someone to have access to, and then you have that interactive approach ability now because of Zoom and everything else that you’re able to learn quickly with. So these three things right there that, to your question, if you would just give it enough time as an entrepreneur, you’ll have an amazing experience.
Mike Zlotnik (17:30.46)
Yeah, that’s I really like and this is so I like the Inclusion of AI obviously Internet has been around for long time AI is the new revolution right whether it’s right or wrong AI model still hallucinate the steel club probably plenty of Erroneous conclusions. However, if you do enough of prompting and enough additional questions and you ask for additional data support
And obviously, you know, we’re doing this virtual environment, right? We are recording this on Riverside, the Zoom, this brave new world in the post-COVID world. Of course, these opportunities are phenomenal. So…
Chris Prefontaine (18:14.544)
Yeah. And I did a little Dixlexia on you there. did it IA, but it’s the grok. I’m sure everybody caught that.
Mike Zlotnik (18:21.642)
Yeah, yeah, grok.ai. Yeah, it’s reverse order. But what would be cool is I think people are building on top of existing models in AI. This is kind of like the revolution is I’ve seen people, other, let’s just call them gurus and specialists. They launch new due diligence tools. But you got to go through that platform to basically not just to go to grok, but
go to whatever the specialty website. And then in the back office, they use these engines. And then they pull the data for you, like owners, demographics, motivation, a bunch of stuff, which is kind of, it’s data driven, but it’s a next generation of data driven. It’s an AI engine on top of a data driven and help accelerate this vetting, maybe even offering process where,
the AI engine, what you just described is based on experience. Maybe you could teach one of these engines to use your kind of model and experience to enhance the offer. So normally you do this offer, but given the data on this specific property, you should tune your model to this. It’s just kind of, it’s AI learning and optimization of what your good old self finance approach looks like. I don’t know if you have any thoughts, if you’ve even tried this.
But it’s you could use the experience or teach the AI engine to
Chris Prefontaine (19:55.377)
Both. I like what you’re saying. Yeah, both. Look, let’s take what you just said there and attach it to a past question you asked. We used to have to get a CRM, get a piece of software for comps, get a website. This is only a few years ago, all our students. We now, I don’t know when this is going to air, but at our upcoming Boston event, we’re going to…
showing yet another version of what our students operate on, which has their CRM, their scripts, their transcription service, their AI’s all built in, the website’s built in, the workflows are all done for you, everything is there. You have one piece of software instead of like eight. That’s crazy from three or four years ago. When I started the company, you had to buy all that.
And so that’s just amazing. So you have a little bit of personal experience and a little bit of the AI for sure to both of your questions.
Mike Zlotnik (20:57.948)
Yeah, it makes sense because the economy of skill kicks in. If you figure it out for one person, right, you could do it for 100 people. It’s just skill ability is the same. They’re just different town and city and wherever they operate. At the end of the day, it’s a local market. They still have to go meet with the owner. They still have to build that rapport. But at the same time, everything else from a technology perspective can be, like you said, taken to the next level. That’s great.
Any good book to recommend? Obviously, you mentioned your books. Any good books? Any good podcasts? Just kind of like what do you think could be a value to the audience?
Chris Prefontaine (21:37.742)
Yeah. there’s a, there’s a cool podcast that’s really good for newer and experienced people, real estate junkies, Russell Ham and Rick Abiati. they are attached to our community now, but their podcasts tends to garner a lot of experience and brand newbies. Cause they started from nothing, left their jobs. That’s pretty cool. I think that’s a cool thing from a book standpoint. I mean,
My book preference changes as I grow, right? But there’s a book that I think everybody should, there’s two books I think everybody should read from the business standpoint, but it also incorporates real estate. One is under the golden hatches, the whole McDonald’s story. Cause that’s life challenges, that’s real estate, that’s business challenges, that’s all that. And then I liked a lot, Shoe Dog, it’s the Nike story. Because again, life challenges, how did they build a business with a young family? How did they scale from zero to
in that case billions of dollars. Those are just two really good business lessons books and by the way there’s real estate we’ve been right so that’s pretty cool.
Mike Zlotnik (22:47.21)
Chris, thank you for sharing. This was awesome. I appreciate you coming on our podcast. yeah, once again, mention how would folks reach out to you and we’ll close.
Chris Prefontaine (22:57.338)
Thank you. Mike, I appreciate it. So wicked smartbooks.com forward slash tempo or wicked, sorry, smartrealestatecoach.com forward slash masters class for the free class.
Mike Zlotnik (23:11.988)
Thank you, Chris.
Chris Prefontaine (23:12.923)
Thank you.
_______________________
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