Brokered by West USA Realty, Inc. Two decades of Arizona real estate — including the years Rafael managed his own rentals before structuring the exit that turned them into note income. Lucia keeps every deal clean.
Seller-first · Process-driven · Clarity over hype
Built from two decades of Arizona deals across every market cycle and every stress test — foreclosure-imminent, tenant-occupied, out-of-state, inherited, distressed, divorce-driven, medical-emergency-fast. Not theory. Real properties. Real sellers. Real deadlines.
One property has more than one exit. We lay out four — cash sale, traditional listing, investor offer, or seller-financed note — side by side with real numbers on your specific property. We're licensed Arizona professionals. If listing is the right call, we'll tell you. If seller financing nets you more, we'll show you the numbers.
Title, escrow, inspection, legal, underwriting, servicing — one team managing every vendor from first call through final payment. You never juggle the handoffs. That's our job.
Every license, award, affiliation, and testimonial on this page is defensible, traceable, and real. Clicks welcome.
Rafael Carrasquillo
Licensed Arizona Realtor
Local Arizona · National · Education
Arizona Association of Realtors
Arizona Regional MLS
Arizona Real Estate Investors Association
SE Valley Regional Realtor Association
West & SouthEast Realtors of the Valley
West USA Realty
National Association of Realtors
Realtor.com
Realtors Property Resource
National REIA
Zillow
NoteSchool
Fortune Builders
Seller Finance Coalition
Housing Hero
I've worked with Rafael on an abundance of different real estate investment transactions dating back to 2003. He always follows through from beginning to end, and is consistent with all transactions. A true expert in the real estate investment arena.
Marcus Cisney
Investor Partner · LinkedIn
A true professional when it comes to distressed real estate assets & business. Very knowledgeable and resourceful when it comes to making sure creative real estate transactions come to fruition. You are in good hands with Rafael.
Melvin Rowland
Investor Partner · LinkedIn
We weren't sure if it was going to be an issue selling our property with our tenant in place. Rafael's team assured us it wasn't — we agreed on a price we liked, they paid cash, paid all the closing costs, and closed in a couple weeks.
John & Kathy Werzynski
Home Sellers · Mesa, AZ
From a crisis that broke a lot of people, to a platform built on what came after.
Marilyn — a seller like the ones we serve today. She didn't want a traditional listing, and she didn't want to give up equity to an investor. We built a third path for her — and it became the blueprint for everything we've structured since.
For me that meant bankruptcy, losing the house, cold showers when the electricity got cut — and my first son arriving in the middle of it.
I’d come up as a real estate investor — buying directly from owners who needed out, taking on the rehab and resale myself while giving them terms good enough to cut loose. I learned the craft the right way: from a listing agent who pulled my comps, investor mentors at Russ Whitney’s organization, and title-company relationships that kept every transaction above board. I got my license in 2007 so I could run the agent side of the work myself, and eventually offer the same top-tier transaction services to other owners with full fiduciary responsibility.
Then the market hit its peak. Everyone assumed the run would keep going. It didn’t. What came next wasn’t about grit or optimism. It was figuring out how to operate when almost everyone else was frozen.
Prices had already dropped hard — short sales, foreclosures, and bank-owned homes were the only transactions getting done. I’d lost funds, lost properties, watched new-construction projects go sideways, and gone through bankruptcy. Most of the private lenders I’d worked with were gone.
What I had to relearn wasn’t deal math — it was how to stay in the game without capital. I leaned on the license harder. Instead of buying, I started representing: listing short sales, running BPOs, negotiating with lenders, handling REO for banks that had inventory they didn’t want. Investor instincts plus licensed discipline is what made me useful again.
That pivot led me back to being an investor-purchaser of assets — this time, mortgage notes instead of houses. I borrowed private capital to buy a handful of Arizona non-performing notes, and by 2013 I’d worked them through default management and gotten paid on the dispositions. Marcus, whose testimonial appears above, came in on the next batch. By 2015, what started as a personal thesis had grown into a seven-figure private note fund with family-office backing, and Lucia stepped out of her own career in bank operations to run transactions and finance on every deal since. Every note I bought used to be someone’s home. That lesson stuck.
The years after were easier. Cheap money, easy financing, buyers everywhere — creative finance became a niche most sellers didn’t need. Then 2020 flipped it. The Fed cut to zero. Mortgage rates hit an all-time low of 2.65% in January 2021. Home prices jumped 30–50%. Then rates doubled in eighteen months, peaking near 7% by mid-2023.
Now the math doesn’t work. Homeowners sitting on 3% mortgages won’t move without losing the rate. Buyers priced out at 7% can’t qualify. Landlords watch passive cash flow evaporate as property taxes jumped 24% and insurance rose 75%. Short-term rental operators in Phoenix, Scottsdale, and beyond face regulatory crackdowns that shrink the market overnight. The playbook I spent fifteen years sharpening is exactly what this moment was built for.
The distressed-note and REO era effectively ended around 2015–2017 — those bulk pools dried up. If you want to work in notes today, you work in seller-financed originated paper. And that’s where the problem is.
Too many of those loans get structured poorly — interest rates that don’t match the market, balloon payments timed wrong, terms that don’t hold up in default. Sellers self-service on spreadsheets, miss the licensing and Dodd-Frank compliance requirements, and end up with exposure they didn’t sign up for. The note itself becomes un-sellable on the open market, because nobody trustworthy will touch it.
That’s what ResiFort exists to fix. We help homeowners, landlords, and investors write seller-financed notes the right way: originated legally, structured correctly, Dodd-Frank compliant, and serviced professionally from day one. Licensed pros. RMLO underwriting. Third-party servicing. Attorney-reviewed documents. Built to stand up to every legal, regulatory, and practical test that eventually comes.
Done right, seller financing isn’t just a cleaner exit for the seller. It’s how a family who can’t qualify with a conventional lender finally gets into a home. It’s how an investor whose deal math can’t survive 7% rates still makes the acquisition pencil. Flexibility on terms and timing, built on paper that’s real, legal, and defensible, is what traditional finance stopped offering. That’s the gap we fill.
If a deal doesn't pencil, we say so. If there's a cleaner structure, we show it. Truth comes before comfort — that's how trust compounds.
Real estate gets complicated. We stay solutions-focused through it — because the path forward only shows up when you're still looking for it.
Every situation has a way through. We don't stop at the obvious path; we keep working until we find the one that actually holds up.
We move with purpose, not motion. Disciplined, strategic action — that's what separates closed deals from spinning wheels.
Our clients aren't transactions. We stay with you past close — the real value of what we build compounds after the paperwork is signed.
Once you're in, your deal is our deal. Your outcome, your equity, your peace of mind — we guard them like our own.
Two founders running the operation. A tight circle of title, underwriting, and legal partners backing every transaction. Small by design — because every deal gets attention, not a queue ticket.
Co-Founder · CEO
Licensed Arizona real estate professional since 2007. Seventeen-plus years operating through every market cycle — boom, collapse, distressed-note trading, and the current rate-locked reality. Creative-finance specialist: seller financing, wraps, subject-to, and notes. Built ResiFort to apply to every transaction the standards these deals actually deserve.
Co-Founder · CIO / CFO / Admin
Operations anchor of ResiFort. Background in banking and finance operations before moving full-time into real estate alongside Rafael. Oversees investment flow, finance discipline, and the day-to-day coordination that keeps every transaction moving cleanly from intake to close. Bilingual operator — a real advantage in every consult with Spanish-speaking families.
Title, underwriting, and legal specialists we partner with on every transaction — so nothing in a ResiFort deal rests on a single pair of hands.
Title Partner
Security Title Agency · AVP & Branch Manager
Branch Manager at Security Title Agency in Phoenix since 2010 — 15+ years coordinating title and escrow work, including the non-traditional seller-financed and creative-finance structures most escrow offices aren't comfortable running through to a clean close. ResiFort's first-line title partner on every transaction.
Underwriting Partner
Owner · Call The Underwriter (CTU)
Owner of Call The Underwriter — full-service RMLO and Dodd-Frank compliance for seller-financed loans. Voted Best of Notes #1 RMLO five years running (2020–2024). NMLS #2671035. On ResiFort deals: borrower qualification, loan estimate & closing disclosure prep, and the underwriting that makes a note actually sellable in the secondary market.
Legal Partner
Partner · KKOS Lawyers · Tax & Asset Protection
Partner at KKOS Lawyers since 2014. Tax attorney for real estate investors, small business owners, and self-directed retirement account holders — over 1,000 entities and estate plans formed. On ResiFort deals he reviews legal and tax structuring: entity setup, compliance, and the fine print that has to hold up under IRS or Dodd-Frank scrutiny.
The Exit Analyzer takes your property and shows how each path actually nets out — a traditional listing, an off-market cash sale, or a creative-finance structure that pays you over time. A few minutes. No address. No pressure. If one of the numbers changes how you're thinking, the consult is where we walk through it.