Jason Dillard

I've been buying, selling, exchanging and financing real estate in South Carolina for 26 years, across more than a thousand transactions.

Most of them looked impossible at first.

I started the way everyone starts — bank financing, large down payments, and the particular stress of being a landlord who owes more than he'd like. What changed the business was learning that the financing is a separate question from the price. A seller who won't take a dollar less will very often take a different set of terms, or a different asset entirely. Once you can build the terms, the deals nobody else can close become the only ones worth looking at.

That's the thread through everything I do. Whether I'm the buyer, the counselor or the broker of record, what I actually bring to a transaction is the structure — the exchange, the paper, the substitution, the sequence of steps that turns an impossible number into a closing.

I'm the Broker-in-Charge at DHP Real Estate LLC in Greer, South Carolina. I acquire and hold manufactured housing communities, land-home packages, residential rentals and commercial property across South Carolina, Georgia, Texas and Ohio — most of it financed with seller-carried paper, an exchange, or private capital rather than a conventional loan.

I'm a member of the Society of Exchange Counselors, founded in 1961 and the country's oldest organization devoted to creative real estate and equity marketing, and an approved educator and moderator for its Education Foundation — which means the national body trusts me both to teach this material and to run the room where the deals get worked. Closer to home I'm active in Greenville Equity Marketing Sessions, where Upstate agents and investors bring each other the deals that need a trade rather than a sale.

I'll take a listing when a listing is what the property needs. Given the choice, I'd rather be a principal — to buy it, exchange into it, or partner on the structure. That tends to align my interest with yours better than a commission does.

If you have a deal that won't finance, here's how I can help. If you're a lender, here's how I borrow.

For several years I hosted a weekly radio show on creative real estate — the archive is here.

I teach this material to brokerages, REIAs and exchange groups.