All Forum Posts by: Sean Cole

@Christopher Blanco they're so hard to find because there's so many of them and it's basically free to call yourself one - kind of like home inspectors in Ohio (if you have a ladder, a truck, and a business card you've got what every home inspector does).  The barriers to entry to call yourself a wholesaler are as close to 0 as possible, but the barriers to entry to be a GOOD wholesaler are much higher.  We spend almost $10,000/month on marketing and another several thousand dollars each month on back-end systems to help track and identify potential deals.

So here's a few challenges that have come up when customers of mine have tried this:

1.  The contractor wants to get paid during the course of the project, just like he was a normal contractor on the job.  When do you get paid on the rehab?  Right, when it sells.  If he's not willing to wait, he's not an investor.

2.  The contractor has no direct incentive to be truthful with his costs/prices for labor (materials can be audited).  If he overbills you by $10k for labor, that's an extra $10k in his pocket before the profit split.

3.  The contractor charges retail (what he'd charge everyone else) for his contribution instead of cost basis.

4.  The contractor is an old white dude with old white dude style and insists on being the design person on the team.  This is really bad news.

Here's a major factor in current housing prices:  Home Prices Rising.

Inventory is at or near historic lows.  Sellers are afraid to list because they don't think they'll be able find a new house that they like or can afford.  The market isn't in balance from a supply/demand perspective, so it's not dissimilar from the jobs market today.  To get back in balance, at some point more sellers are going to need to list and more people that are out of the job market will have to come back.

Part of what makes that chart so scary looking is that it's not inflation adjusted.  It would look quite different if it were based on 1990 dollars.  Using the Inflation calculator here:  https://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Calc...
The $100,000 home in 1990 is $190,611.46 today.  I'm not arguing that the market isn't hot, it's just not as hot as the chart makes it look.

@Jay Hinrichs you're right again, but you'd also have to prove that the wholesaler didn't have the ability to close, wouldn't you?  You could allege it all day, but without proof they couldn't close, it seems that you'd be stuck.  The allegations would be "On information and belief..." but they wholesaler's attorney would just deny the allegation in their response, wouldn't they?  

Now the flip side is whether or not the wholesaler is interested in joining you in court and expending the legal fees, of course!

Your website is not currently active.  Any reason for that?

Found $3k in cash in the basement sitting on top of a drop ceiling tile.  Same house found a Polaroid photo of the previous owner servicing her husband - with eye contact for the camera.

@Account Closed if you know it's required for the listing agent to disclose, why be worried about buying it from someone else?  You're literally insisting on paying for something that is required to be given to you for free!

@Account Closed check your state laws, but I'd have to guess they're the same as Ohio in this regard.  If a previous buyer backed out of a purchase contract after an inspection was performed, most of the time the listing agent and/or seller were provided a copy of the report.  At a minimum, they were given a list of items that the other buyer wanted fixed.  Disclosure laws in Ohio require that the listing agent and seller disclose any and all items in that report or repair list to all potential other buyers.

It's a big enough deal here that some agents specifically tell selling agents to NOT send them inspection reports.