Buy The Loan, Not The Building.

A note is the loan itself — the borrower’s written promise to repay, secured by a mortgage recorded against a specific property. When you buy one you step into the lender’s seat on that loan. You are not buying the house, and you are not buying shares in a company that owns houses. You own the debt, you hold the first lien, and the borrower’s equity sits underneath you. In much of the country the same instrument is called a trust deed; the mechanics are the same.

Monthly, by ACH, out of the payment the borrower makes to us. Riva services every note it places — we collect, we post, we handle escrow and insurance, and we send your interest on a set day each month. Our loans are interest-only, so the monthly payment is interest and your principal stays outstanding until the loan pays off at sale or refinance. You get a statement each month and a Form 1099-INT each January.

We work it out, with the same team, the same file, and your lien in front. A missed payment starts with a phone call, not a filing. From there the options are the ones a first lien gives you: forbearance, a modification, a payoff, a deed in lieu, or foreclosure if it comes to that. The equity cushion is what buys the time to choose well rather than fast. Riva has taken no principal losses to date. That is a record, not a guarantee, and a note can lose money.

Not for an individual note. A whole note assigned to you is a loan you own directly, and we place those with individual investors whether or not they meet the SEC thresholds. We still ask, because the answer tells us which structures are open to you — interests in the Riva Real Estate Credit Fund are offered to accredited investors only. If you are accredited, more doors open. If you are not, notes are still one of them.

$25,000 to start. As for how many: one note is one borrower and one roof. Concentration is the honest trade you make for choosing your own collateral. Most investors who stay with this build to three or four positions across different properties, markets, and maturity dates before they would call it a portfolio. If you would rather not do that arithmetic yourself, the fund has already done it.

Yes, and a good number of our note investors do. The custodian holds the note and the lien in the account’s name, the interest is paid into the account, and the tax treatment follows the account rather than you. You will need a custodian who handles real estate debt, and the paperwork adds about a week before funding. Tell us on the first call so the documents are drawn correctly the first time. We do not give tax advice — ask your accountant whether the account is the right home for this.

Exactly the way we underwrite the loans we keep, because they are the same loans. Every file gets a full interior appraisal, a title commitment and a lender’s policy, an insurance binder, a credit pull and a liquidity review on the borrower, and on a renovation loan a line-by-line read of the scope of work. We size to the collateral rather than to the borrower’s optimism. Riva’s own capital and our credit fund sit in the same paper we place with investors.

It is not, and you should plan on that. A note runs 6 to 24 months and pays off when the property sells or refinances — that is your liquidity event, and it is the only scheduled one. There is no public market for the paper and no redemption window. We can sometimes place a note with another investor if your circumstances change, but nobody is obliged to buy it and we will not promise a price. Investors who need the money moving stagger their maturities instead.