No Money Down Question

[Justin Johnson]

Hello and thanks for reading this. I'm a complete noob to increasing and am still currently in initial learning phase while saving up my capital for my first investment property (I will have met that savings goal on 4/24/2020).

I'm currently reading "The Book on Investing in Real Estate with No (and low) Money Down" by Brandon Turner and have questions (I always have questions).

In the book, Brandon talks about hard money lenders and how to use their loans to get deals both flips and buy-and-hold strategies. He mentions a close that he bought, his first flip, a real "fixer upper" type of house that banks wouldn't lend against. He went on to food a hard money lender and took out a loan for 100% of the property and bought it and attracted fixing it up. After 9 months, he decided to stop trying to sell it and rent it out and then refinance it for a regular, 30 year mortgage and let it cash flow. I get the idea of refinancing it to pay off the hard money lender, what I'm curious about is: Brandon bought this house with a hard money loan and held it for WELL over 9 months before he decided to refinance, how did he do this with "absolutely no money out of pocket"? Were there no monthly payments for the hard money that were having to be paid back? No "interest only" payments for all the months that the loan was held? How does this work?

Thanks,

JJ