Real Estate Agent Punished for working with Wholesalers.

[James Wise]

The Ohio Division of Real Estate recently published some yearly reports that detailed all of the fines, punishments, license suspensions and license revocations they've issued to people for illegal activity.

Below you'll see wholesalers who were fined for illegally brokering real estate as well as an Agent who was fined and had his license suspended for working with wholesalers. 

Let this be a lesson to you that putting a property under contract with a seller so you can assign it to a buyer for a fee is nothing more than illegally brokering real estate. Anyone here on Bigger Pockets, or elsewhere, telling you it's not, is either an idiot or a criminal. Not only will the state go after the wholesalers, they will go after agents who were working with the wholesalers.

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[Don Konipol]

Well it’s interesting that almost all the violations consisted of MARKETING a property either without holding a license and or without the owners permission.  Nowhere do I see obtaining a contract to purchase a property, and assigning the contract to an end buyer listed as a violation.  The commission has apparently chosen to go after the “low hanging fruit”.  
This is of course just a single state, and since each state has different rules and laws, we need to be careful in making generalizations.

I would thing real estate commissions would have a lot more difficulty defending an action which fines someone who has a contract to purchase and assigns that contract.  If that person “markets” the property on mls the commission may have a case; but if the Wholesaler merely contacts his own network to assign the contract an action by the commission may get into Federal Constitutional issues. 
We also may be getting into a distinction between someone who occasionally may assign, for a fee, a property he has under contract, and someone in the BUSINESS of getting properties under contract and trying to assign those contracts for a fee and the not closing on the contracts he’s unable to profitably assign.  Also, a distinction between someone doing the above with residential properties vs someone trying to wholesale commercial properties.