Becoming A Real Estate Agent
I currently have a business in wholesale and am getting my real estate license in CT. Are there any current agents with any tips? I am also looking to connect with a broker to get my license under. What is the best way to do so?
I'm not a realtor but I work with a ton of them and one great thing about what doing you're doing is that you can basically use your license to give you more trustworthiness than a regular wholesaler.
And your investor strategy is better than being a regular real estate agent because working with investors is a great niche.
Investors don't care what a place looks like. They only care about the numbers.
Also, after they've repaired the property, there's a good chance that they'll call you to list the deal. And real estate agents ALWAYS want Seller Listings over Buyer Listings.
Plus, the good ones know exactly what sells as quickly as possible for the best ROI. You don't have to hold their hands.
I answered another user's post (and now I mentor her) here where I showed how you can triple your commissions by working exclusively with investors: https://www.biggerpockets.com/...
As for the brokers, you want to find someone that isn't going to force you to do a bunch of crap that doesn't work or dominate your time. The #1 complaint about my clients' previous brokers was that they had to go to lame sales meetings and stuff like that all of the time.
One of my clients even had a broker scream at her because she had the audacity to take a call from a lead during a meeting. I told her to find another broker because you need to call people back within five minutes because the first person to communicate with a lead wins their business 95% of the time.
You basically want a broker that will let you run wild and sign off on deals quickly.
Now to find a good broker, you first need to put yourself in the driver seat by building a list of LOCAL buyers/investors and what they want. Three bedrooms? Quads? 20-unit properties? Get specifics.
Then you'll be able to reach out to brokers and say, "I've built a list of local investors that want me to find them properties. Can I do that with relative autonomy through your brokerage?"
To find these buyers/investors, use software like Propstream or Freedomsoft to find people in your area that own five or more properties AND have bought a property with CASH within the last six to nine months.
If you like (or anyone reading this anywhere in the country), PM me and I'll do a search for you and send you a list of buyers/investors in your area for free. Hopefully, my kindness will have cause you to bring me some deals in the future.
======SIDE NOTE====== If you're working in a larger city like Chicago, you might come across some rude a-holes because they might be getting called by a lot of wholesalers that never do jack-diddly-squat.
But if you do get an a-hole, reach out to them via writing to show you're serious.
Investors in smaller cities don't get bugged as much.
And in larger cities, you might focus on a smaller area. I find an area with around 50K people works well. Here in the San Diego City area, that's a 1-3 mile radius. In Koreatown LA, it's like 1/4 mile. And out in Joshua Tree, it's like a 50 mile radius. ============
That will give you a good list of active buyers/investors to call and also follow up with a text.
Finally, make sure to do some house-hacking and, if you haven't already, use your VA loan over and over again. A lot of people don't know you can get VA loans for additional properties.
I'd buy a quad and live in one unit. Rent the others out. Maybe one on AirBnB and the other two normally.
Then buy more and more. A buddy of mine has done really well renting short term rentals near MCAS Miramar because the base has contractors come in all of the time for weeks to repair things.
