My Wholesaling Journey - Charlie P.
I recently started a new job for a partnership of wholesalers. I will be working as a property scout to dig up deals for them.
The purpose of this thread is to document my experience for everyone else to observe and learn from, as well as gain insight and learn from the reader’s suggestions.
Company Background:
These guys have a very extensive real estate background and have been in the business a long time. Both own their own brokerages as well as their own investment property. One owns well over 150 units and the other owns far less but they are generally all higher earning commercial properties.
They are open to any and all kinds of real estate transactions that will bring in money. They have bought and rehabbed some, bought low and sold high (no rehab), flipped (contract assignment/wholesale – everyone uses different terms for this but I’m referring to when you don’t ever take title but just sell your contract to purchase), bought non-performing notes from banks to then foreclose on a property and own it for a really cheap price, etc.
I am paid a small base salary as well as 10% of all the profits from the deals I bring in.
I'm not looking for any specific kind of deal. When I find one we will figure out what we want to do with it. Most will be good to buy and sell to rehabbers, others we may rehab ourselves then sell to investors or owner occupants. Kinda depends on the situation.
My work:
The first tasks that they want me to work on entail looking up properties within a specific area that are delinquent on taxes. There are actually two zones, both about 9 square blocks total.
This is a pretty tedious task. It involves using the city property info section on the county website. Every county’s site is different but on ours I can type in “11” in the street number form and “Main St” in the street forum and it will pull up every house on the 1100 block of main st. I then click one by one on each property and then the property tax tab. Once I’m there it tells me if they are delinquent or not, how much they owe, and the years they have or haven’t paid. I keep and excel sheet containing each delinquent property, the owners name, mailing address, and the amount they owe.
Zone 1:
After about 4-5 hours of data searching, I finished the first zone and came up with 17 properties. From here I looked up the owners names on whitepages.com to try to find their phone number. I could only find 8 phone numbers on there. Two of the numbers were no longer in service. I called and left messages for two, and actually got answers on the other three.
1. One of them said that the house was vacant and boarded up, copper and A/C units had been stolen and they don’t know what do to with it. I was pumped, this is a great lead. She said she is currently going through medical issues and wont be able to meet me or do anything with the property for at least a month. I told her I would just swing by take a look and shoot her a bid on the assumption that it’s a full rehab. That’s on tomorrow’s to do list.
2. Another that answered said they don’t really need to sell and it would probably take an offer of about $200k to get them to go through with anything. I’m going to get a reasonable bid together anyway and see if it leads anywhere. I’m not really counting on this one though.
3. The third answered call said the person I needed to talk to was at work. Ill try back in the morning.
I plan on sending mailers out to the rest that I didn’t get a hold of this week.
For all those hours and hours of work, I got one lead. Lets hope things pick up.
Zone 2:
Got 32 properties that are behind on taxes. Only 10 phone numbers, 4 of which are not longer in service. Left messages for 3 and got a hold of 1. She isn’t that interested in selling. It’s a good rental property for her but she would be interested in hearing a price. I drove by and had my supervisor help with pricing it out. We looked up her original loan amount in MARIS and she owes more than the bid we would be able to give her. Dead end.
I will start sending out mailers soon to the rest.
New tactic I will be starting tomorrow:
Padmapper.com is a site that takes all craigslist ads for apartments and puts them all on a Google map form. It also keeps pricing averages for certain neighborhoods. But best of all for me – I can find tons of properties in exact areas I want that have vacancies, which a lot of the times lead me to stressed property owners that want to sell. Also, their phone number (which should definitely be in service since they posted it) is right there. Tomorrow I will probably spend an hour or two calling those, two hours getting mailers ready, and a few hours building more lists of delinquent taxes.
Overall, I spent 9/10ths of my time collecting the data for people to contact and about 1/10th of my time actually contacting people.
I will only bring in deals by talking to people. I wish the research didn’t take so long so that I could just spend the whole day calling people.
This thread was created after reading Greg Smith’s – “A beginner’s wholesaling journey”. I thought it was really interesting and thought people might want to read about my experiences as well. Out of my company’s best interest, I will leave their name out of this as well as what city we are in since there are direct competitors on this site.
Sorry this was so long. Its just because it’s the first one
Any comments or suggestions on what I am doing and better strategies?