All Forum Posts by: Braden C.

Your first sentence and last sentence contradict each other. If I am screwing over a homeowner, what's the difference between assigning the contract or closing and then reselling the property? 

The "regular" wholesaler bashers always make two points 

1. That wholesalers should be licensed 

2. That wholesalers steal equity from uneducated sellers and all properties should be listed on the MLS to get the highest and best price

I agree with the first point, and reject the argument that a wholesaler does anything other than broker a real estate transaction. They might do more work and have to be more creative than a typical agent but at the end of the day, they're connecting a buyer and a seller together. 

The second point is where I have a problem. There's several different scenarios where selling directly to an investor or a wholesaler and not listing a property on the MLS is beneficial. The first and most common one I deal with are houses about to be sold on the courthouse steps that have equity. If I find a deal that's going to be sold at auction in let's just say two weeks, should I pass because it's not on the MLS and I don't want to feel unethical? OR, should I approach the homeowner, explain that I am an investor who can close in a week, put money in their pocket, give them time to move (or even rent back) and avoid the auction?

I'd be curious if any of the "regulars" that seem to obsess over wholesalers have ever bought an off-market deal. If you have, then your only real argument about wholesalers can be about licensing. If your argument is that they steal equity, and you've bought an off-market deal, then you're simply a hypocrite. 

Learning how to flip or wholesale properties is just another tool in your bag. I don't think it's a bad idea at all to learn something new. If you're wholesaling, you'll hopefully learn how to find great deals, seems like that would be very useful when it's time to find a multi-family property to buy. 

Just be careful thinking that either of these methods are going to get you your multifamily property quickly. Both are hard work and take time, it would be easy to get burned out and give-up on the end goal. 

If you wholesaled the property, you wouldn't give your end buyer an inspection period, right? Sounds like you made a good decision and passed on the deal but in the future, just triple check your numbers and if it's a solid deal, who cares about the inspection period? If you anticipate major unseen issues when doing your numbers, you'll be fine. 

Around 2012 when buying REO properties became super competitive we started making all of our offers with no contingencies. I was told by more than one agent that our offer wasn't the highest but the bank accepted it because we didn't ask for an inspection period. That only lasted a few months before everyone was doing the same thing.

The wholesaler should provide you with an assignment agreement, assuming they're assigning the contract they have with the current owner. Have you already verbally agreed to a price?

You need to make sure you get title insurance at closing, don't do the deal without it. If for some reason you can't get clear title, make sure the assignment agreement says you will get your EMD back. I would insist that the closing attorney holds your EMD since you don't already have a relationship with the wholesaler. I would talk with the closing attorney and make sure you're comfortable with them. If you aren't comfortable, pay a real estate attorney a couple hundred bucks to review the closing docs.

The title of the thread is "Best Way to find CASH Buyers" but your post says you're struggling with finding motivated sellers, which is it? 

To find buyers, find great deals. You don't need a huge list of cash buyers if you have great deals. 

To find great deals, turn over as many rocks as you possibly can. Drive for dollars, send direct mail, pay per click, SEO, search craigslist, door knock, network, etc. It's not easy, at all... If it was, everyone would be doing it and making lots of money. Persistence pays off, keep working and don't give up. There are deals out there all the time, the people getting them are the ones taking action and finding them before anyone else. Good luck! 

@Oren Elbaz If you want to really dive deep for deals, search the property appraiser in whatever area you're looking in and try and pull up all multi family properties. Then you can look for "mom and pop" owners. When I do it, I am looking for ownership in their name, not an LLC or corp. Then I look at length of ownership, hoping to find the "tired" landlords. I'll also look for motivation triggers like unpaid taxes, code violations, lots of recent evictions, etc., these are all usually found on the clerk of court website for the county you're looking in. When I find one that meets what I feel is a likely motivated seller, I pursue it hard until I get an absolute no. I can still market to all the other owners, but I put a lot more time into the ones I feel will most likely sell. Good luck!

We drive for dollars at least twice a week. In an hour we can find 20-30 vacant properties and then we spend another hour or two researching each one. I want to know if the property has any mortgages, liens, back owed taxes, and what the ownership looks like. When we find one that isn't completely upside down, we pursue by finding a phone number or sending a letter. 

 A little over $100/SF which didn't include the land purchase and my permit/impact fees. If I didn't have control over the project and do some of the work myself, it would've been much higher. I tried to save money in just about every single thing we did. For example, our cabinetry was 40% less than our lowest proposal because I took the time to go directly to a manufacturer and become a dealer (there's a lot of mark-up in cabinets). 

On the flip side, I dealt with all of the headaches, and there were quite a few. 

I just spend the last year building a house in Florida for my family. It was a rewarding but extremely stressful experience for my first time. I didn't hire a builder but I did have a good family friend basically run everything and double check all the subs' work before we would pay any draws. Like many others have said, labor is in demand right now so I spent a good amount of time getting 3-5 estimates from each trade. The prices we were getting were all over the place. For example, one of the better known framers in our area was $8.50/sq ft for labor and we went with someone at $4.50/sq ft, for our house that was over a $20,000 difference. 

Best of luck if you decide to pull the trigger! 

How is he in breach of the contract?