Skip to content
Wholesaling

User Stats

224
Posts
40
Votes
Michael Lerch
  • Investor
  • Grand Rapids, MI
40
Votes |
224
Posts

Is it really easier to wholesale in some markets?

Michael Lerch
  • Investor
  • Grand Rapids, MI
Posted Jan 26 2015, 18:05

This should probably be a blog post, but thought I'd throw it out here as a question.

I've been busting my butt for 3 years wholesaling and I've managed to do under 10 deals in West Michigan market from 3k-5k assignments each. After listening to a certain guru podcast about setting goals and figuring out how much you need to make per deal to cover your cost per lead and then some to hit your own profit goals per year I realized that I've pretty much been breaking even in my business. I want to break that cycle.

I feel like my market takes a lot of work to get a deal, I can honestly say that now after 3 years of hustling to make deals happen without feeling like a total newb with mailers, bandit signs, networking, being top dog on google yahoo and bing, but I'll see other wholesalers in different markets across the U.S. putting in a similar effort with great work ethic like mine and just churn deals out left and right consistently. I just shake my head and ask myself "Why is it so much harder to do that here... could I do the same if I were over there? Am I just suffering from grass is greener syndrome or is the grass really greener while I'm eating short dried up brown grass trying to survive?" 

Side story: In college I did a sales internship with University Directories out of Chapel Hill NC. Great program by the way! We were trained for 2 weeks there how to sell print ads out of the back of our college directories to local businesses back in our college towns. I went to Northern Michigan University in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the great city of Marquette MI. Great town, but absolutely DEVASTATING to sell any kind of print advertising (just in general anywhere really, but in particular here) and we finished with about 30k in sales that summer. We didn't hit our goal, but we did well considering our market size and it was 2009 when businesses were tightening their purse strings. Day after day we would report our results for leads, sales calls, and actual sales. Then about an hour later listen to the daily sales call from HQ in Chapel Hill reporting in the Top 10 sales totals from the previous day to give them praise and congratulate them. All these other big market colleges like in Alabama, Ohio, NC, CA, Texas, and so on were absolutely CRUSHING IT! Every day was a 5-10K+ day! If they had 2 or 3 good sales guys at a big college on a good day would report in something crazy like 30k. I even trained with some of these guys, hung out with them, and felt like I was on par with them in sales skills when we would role play our scripts but they were killing it and I wasn't.

My point here is this: I feel like I've been trying to fish in a small pond for far too long. Not only deals in quantity are low and hard to come by, but also the overall amount of equity in houses around here don't allow for 10-15k wholesale deals. Does anyone feel the same in their market? I believe some markets are iffy for wholesaling while others are particularly primed for wholesaling success. 

Feel free to disagree. I will always wholesale in my backyard, but now that I've cut my teeth over these past 3 years and come to this realization I will start marketing with the same effort to other cities to actually have a business that makes money and not one that just breaks even.  

Loading replies...