All Forum Posts by: Corey Demuth

The way I understand it, there are two ways to go about bird dogging. One is the trust system, no paperwork, you just bring parties together. But then, what's to stop them from just cutting you out once you've introduced them? See the problem? The only way to prevent this is some kind of paperwork.

Getting a broker's license is not a small task. In most areas I believe you must have already been an agent for a number of years, and some states even require you to have completed college courses on real estate, finance, etc (CA requires 8 courses if I remember correctly!)

just be careful, bird-dogging is considered brokering without a license, and is illegal in some (if I recall correctly, many) areas.

Justin you make money by either selling your contract to the investor for a fee (5k, 10k, however much they are willing to pay for it). Or, you negotiate the price down to one amount, then offer the house to investors at a second, higher amount and double close. The difference between those two prices is your profit.

Example: You find a house and get the seller to agree to let it go for 150k. You find an investor and tell him he can get the property for 170k. If you succeed at completing the whole transaction, you just made 20k. Be prepared some people get seriously pissed when they find out you're making a decent spread on the deal... Either the seller or the investor may blow up when the find out you stand to make 20k just for putting the deal together. Read up about this a LOT before you even think about trying it.

How can you do that though? You don't own the street. A lot of people don't realize that but in most areas at least, you do NOT own the road next to your house. It's an issue near where I work; people that live in the houses around here get upset because workers from local businesses park in front of random houses (because the businesses do not have sufficient parking.)

I could commit now as well.

Josh just a thought but on some forums when the admins need something addressed they have send out a private message to everyone. Would you be willing to do something like to alert everyone about this thread? It's possible there are a ton of people who would be interested, but who just haven't seen this damn thread. The forum does have a TON of categories to browse...

wholesaling, in a nut shell, is finding a house and negotiating a bargain basement price out of the seller, but you don't actually buy the house, you get them to sell you exclusive rights to buy the house for a set period of time (say 60 days for example.) Then you find an investor who's interested in the property (or ideally you already have a rolodex full of investors looking for property) and try to get someone to buy the property. Typically they buy your rights/contract on the property, then they buy it at the price you already negotiated with the seller. Also common is double closing, where you do two closings in a row using the funds from one transaction for the other transaction. Someone else can explain the ins and outs of it better I'm just trying to give you the 30 second overview.

*Edit* The reason wholesaling is commonly recommended to new investors, is the fact that you can sometimes secure a property for very little money. You can give the owner a small amount, say $500 or $5,000, as "earnest money" in order to get them to sign papers giving you the exclusive right to buy the property at the price you negotiated with them for a set period of time.

Why is this a good thing? Well, in case you can't find an investor and can't fund the deal yourself, the most you stand to lose is your earnest money. In theory, wholesaling lets you secure properties and get the exclusive right to market them to other investors for a period of time. In practice, it's a lot harder than it sounds.

Good luck!

Also, I would check sites like craigslist, backpage, rent.com, apartments.com, etc and see what other apartments are listed for in your area. Don't assume that a real estate agent's idea of market rent is accurate (not sure if that's where you got your figure or not, a lot of new landlords seem to do that at first.)

I think Josh is still holding out on some more of the lurkers speaking up... where are you lurkers???

The bottom line is if we don't have at least 100 or so people going, it isn't practical to make this happen. In terms of getting a venue, enticing vendors to come (and thus pay for some of it), etc... all depend on the numbers. I don't think we can get a venue for an event with like 20 people. And I don't think a vendor would drop any cash or bother to travel to only have a shot at selling something to 20 people.

Realistically, if 100 people post in this thread saying they'd like to go, we will be lucky if 20 of them actually end up going. A lot of people are all talk. Some people will have last minute excuses. Others are borderline not able to afford this, and the location and final cost will ultimately affect whether or not they can even go.

So, if Josh needs say 100-200 people (that figure is a guess on my part but I'm quite confident the real number is at least > 100) to ATTEND in order to make this work, then that means we need several hundred, if not a couple thousand, members posting here saying that they want to go.

It's like mortgage brokering, or showing apartments, or website traffic conversion (the number of visitors that actually click an ad on your site or buy your product) or anything else... it's a numbers game. If you show an apartment to a bunch of people, several of them will swear up and down that it's the nicest place they have ever scene and they can't wait to move in and they are totally serious but then it will often turn out that either they can't come up with the deposit and 1st month's rent, or they will just flake out and change their mind or say they found a better place. And this always seems to happen at the last minute.

So... in my opinion... we need a LOT MORE PEOPLE to express interest here in order for Josh to start seriously working on setting this up. It's not fair to expect him to invest his time in it otherwise.

Wow, thread resurrection is getting rampant these days!

Personally I had zero luck getting into wholesaling, there are way too many people out there trying to be wholesalers because they think it's the easiest way to make quick cash, and they think it's a simple thing that you can do with no money (or almost no money.)

In reality what often happens is no one takes you seriously and you have to try to really hide what you are actually doing, because as soon as anyone involved (sellers, banks, other investors, brokers, agents, etc) find out that you are a "wholesaler," you lose all credibility and they avoid you like the plague. There are a lot of green investors out there trying to wholesale and get rich overnight, and there are a few halfway successful ones that know what they're doing but they just are way too greedy and try to make an insane profit on each deal.

Both of these types are ruining it for everyone because once someone has dealt with one of those "wholesalers", they just never want to do business with a wholesaler again.

So, in my opinion, it's not a good thing to try to do as your full-time business and I would not recommend even trying to do it except, as mentioned above, as an exit strategy when all else fails.

*edit* I would just like to add that I am sure it is different in different areas. I am located in the northeast and only looked into doing it around here. Like everything else, many real estate strategies can work in the midwest or the south, but they don't fly in the northeast. Price is a big factor I think. For example, wholesalers claim to be able to put down a few grand (or even a few hundred) and secure an exclusive option to buy. Well, that might work when the value of the property is 50k or even 100k, but when it's a 400k house, even $5000 really doesn't mean anything to the owner or get you anywhere.

hate to be the devil's advocate here, but that ad is from Baltimore. at the risk of possibly offending someone, I'm going to comment that Baltimore doesn't exactly have a reputation for maintaining the best education system... this poster may be just trying to reach out to the locals in their own (and his) vernacular.