Tim Swierczek (Mortgage Loan Officer)

Tim Swierczek is a mortgage loan officer for Gold Star Mortgage Financial Group, and a real estate investor.

A native of Minneapolis, Swierczek grew up on the northeast side of the city, in an era when that section of the city was less revered than it is today.

“I’m retro cool,” Swierczek says with a jovial laugh.  

“It’s cool to be in Northeast Minneapolis now, but when I was a kid, it was blue collar, a lot of Polish Catholics.”

A social butterfly, Swierczek attended high school at DeLaSalle, where he was homecoming king and class president, the latter a position that required presiding over his 84 constituents to the best of his abilities.

“I liked people, and I still like people,” Swierczek says.

“Back then, I was friends with everyone. There wasn’t just one group of people that I hung out with.”

After graduation, Swierczek enrolled at the prestigious University of Minnesota.

His initial plan was to be a politician, which would be preceded by being an anchor for a news station, so he studied journalism.

“But I found out that I didn’t like journalism because it was dishonest and cutthroat,” he mentions, his engaging laugh once again on display.

Never one for unnecessary disharmony, Swierczek also saw how divisive politics were among his friends, so soon politics too became disenchanting.

Years later, Swierczek, having ditched the trappings of politics, leveraged his amiable personality and friendly demeanor to land a sales job at Volkswagen.

“At that point, I realized sales could be a good career path for me, and I thought working at Volkswagen would be good for my development,” the DeLaSalle alum notes.

Swierczek’s intuition proved to be correct.

Over the course of the next five years, he flourished as a car salesman, becoming a top rep for the dealership and a top 50 salesman in all North America.

But after September 11^th, 2001, things changed, both for the United States, car sales, and subsequently the passion Swierczek had for his job. 

“Everything changed when they went to 0% financing. People would walk into the dealership, and the first thing that they mentioned was financing. They no longer cared about the car,” Swierczek explains.

“I thought we were selling a good car with great value, but everything became about interest rates, to the point where it seemed like people were more interested in driving an interest rate instead of a car.”

Pondering an occupational pivot, Swierczek soon learned about how mortgage loan officers helped homebuyers secure financing for their upcoming purchase.

Curious, but not knowing much about real estate in general, Swierczek began to delve deeper into the topic.

“Back then there was no YouTube, TikTok, or podcasts that could teach me about real estate,” Swierczek says.

“I had to learn by talking to other people.”

So Swierczek did just that, and he learned that becoming a mortgage loan officer wasn’t an arduous endeavor.

Moreover, the earning potential in that profession was vastly higher than brokering the sale of automobiles.

“From there I could see the writing on the wall,” the numbers-minded Swierczek deadpans.

Right away, Swierczek encountered a lot of competition in the mortgage loan industry.

“We were a dime a dozen, and it took no skill,” Swierczek says, adding that when he got into mortgage loans, one didn’t need a license to conduct business, which opened up the industry to anyone who wanted to write loans.

Still, Swierczek was determined to persevere, so to distinguish himself from other mortgage loan officers, he wrote loans that for others would be deemed too challenging or not profitable enough.

“I did a lot of subprime loans,” Swierczek says, which involved working with buyers who had less than ideal credit.

“The company I worked for was too small to compete on price alone, so I told people to give me their most difficult loan, and that I would work hard to get it done.”

For the next two years, Swierczek worked tirelessly to foster a stellar reputation by taking on difficult clients and servicing family and friends, but over time business began to find him, and more opportunities gradually emerged.

It’s now been 22 years since Swierczek left car sales and transitioned into writing mortgage loans.

Like anyone working in real estate, Swierczek has experienced firsthand the tumultuous nature of the housing market, but the last two-plus decades have also allowed Swierczek to home in on what aspect of mortgage loan origination he likes best.

For context, Swierczek can write loans for all types of properties, but his specialty is partnering with investors who want to make a dent in the real estate landscape.

“My favorite is helping the person who wants to house hack a duplex because they need the help and guidance,” says Swierczek.

“With that, I’m not just drawing up agreements and sending them to an underwriter. Instead, I am having a conversation with clients and helping them figure out a plan for not just their first property, but also how they can eventually acquire more real estate.”

As someone who has amassed a considerable, multi-state real estate portfolio, Swierczek is a proven source of information for those looking to diversify their investment strategy.

At the same time, Swierczek does not claim to be a savant who is immune to the inherent risks that are associated with leaping into the unknown.

“I’ve done real estate for a long time, and consequently I have made a lot of mistakes. In that sense, I’m self-taught,” Swierczek humbly acknowledges.

“But I have learned enough to know that many of the people who are teaching real estate these days are giving bad advice.”

Adds Swierczek:

“The people who have built massive wealth through real estate, they don’t typically abide by conventionality.”

For example, it’s often thought that a viable way to profit from real estate is to buy cheap houses and build value with those properties, but Swierczek, while not completely dismissing the effectiveness of that method, offers an alternative approach.

“I am generalizing here, but a lot of people focus on the cost and not the revenue of a property, so they end up ignoring profit. They think that a lower cost automatically means more profit, but that’s not necessarily true,” he explains.

“It’s actually more common that an expensive property in a better area can get better rent. Following that train of thought, I would encourage people to look in the better areas of their city versus focusing exclusively on securing a cheap house in a bad area and then trying to revitalize it.”

It’s this type of expertise, combined with a genuine desire to help people, that has gotten Swierczek to where he is at today, and at present, Swierczek has no plans on slowing down.

If anything, he wants to pour into the next wave of aspiring real estate entrepreneurs and help them accomplish some of their biggest goals.

But to do that, an individual seeking to break into real estate must take action, which leads to Swierczek’s final piece of advice.

“Don’t wait to be ready to invest in real estate because often people on the outside of this industry don’t know what it takes to be ready, or they think they need things that they really don’t,” Swierczek says.

“It doesn’t have to be me, but if you want to get into real estate, meet with a professional and formulate a plan of action with someone who has actually accomplished what you are hoping to achieve. That’s truly the first step to making your real estate dreams become a reality.” QS

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