Sorry, Flipping Houses Does Not Make You a Professional Wholesaler



Posted: Saturday, June 27, 2009

by Duane Stephens
Metroplex Houses

I have been in the business of Real Estate Wholesaling for over two decades and have met many people who refer to themselves as professional wholesalers. They flip houses for a living, but that is all they do. They use various means to locate a house and then their determination of the value is usually wrong. I have many of them call me and ask if I have a buyer for the property. In almost every case, they want to split their assignment fee for me to provide an investor. They rarely have a data-base of investors to buy their contract. Of course this will cost you a considerable part of your assignment fee. I do understand that there are situations where they may just be getting started or they may be a person you are networking with. In some cases you use other wholesalers that you network with to get a contract bought. You may not have any investors that would be interested in the property and one of your networking partners does have one. This is an important part of the wholesaling business. Making money using different marketing and networking strategies.

After many conversations with people that refer to themselves as wholesalers, I recognize very quickly that they have very little knowledge and have a game plan of exactly zero. No investor data-base, no marketing plan, no networking plan, no business plan and just no plan. They are people that are just trying to make a fast buck and that is perfectly okay. But they are not professional wholesalers. I would refer to them as a Bird Dog. Bird Dogs are finders and locaters of distressed property with a possibly motivated seller. In most cases they are very inexperienced and have very little skill in closing the deal . That is just fine also. You have to start somewhere. Even people that have spent excessive amounts of money with so called gurus seem to have very little skills and are confused as to how they build a good solid business wholesaling real estate properties.

Do you know about Hard Money, Rehabbing, Buy, Hold to Rent, Buy , Hold to Sell, Rental Management, Vacant Houses and their absentee owners, advertising campaigns, farming, networking, marketing, negotiating, title companies, contracts? These are skills that a good professional wholesaler would be able to implement on a case by case basis.

This is a professional business and you need to decide if you want to be well rounded and skillful or just very limited in the deals you can put together and very limited in the amount of money you can make. Experienced investors respect knowledge and they rely on your skills to make transactions go smoothly and give them good sound options when purchasing wholesale property. You also need these skills to determine the exit strategies you use to hold property for your long term wealth or rehabbing houses for tremendous profits.

You can make a great living in this business, but there are dues to pay. If some so called guru tells you that it is "so easy", he must be talking about how to hit the Pay Pal Button.

Good Luck Everyone,

Duane Stephens

www.LearnToWholesaleHouses.com

Professional Real Estate Wholesaler and Author of "Learn To Wholesale Houses". Twenty-five years of experience/contracted over 200 properties. Expert author of many articles published on various websites and Syndicated Columnist. Mentor to over 100 real estate wholesalers. Former Securities Broker with over 25 million dollars in Venture Capital acquired. Professional Golfer for 22 years.

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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)
» left by Linda xin
from San Antonio Texas 2 years 322 days ago.
I have been wholesaling for a short period of time. I never realized that there was so much more to this business. I liked this article very much. I appreciate the information a lot and hope to see more articles from this author.
 
Linda Xin
» left by Mark Snyder
from Ft. Worth, Texas 2 years 309 days ago.
The article was written very well, I think that I am just in the Bird Dog category. I never realized that Wholesaling or being a Professional Wholesaler included so many different areas of expertise. I have just been focused on trying to get a deal together. This article will encourage me to spend a little more time on other things that this author has listed. Thanks for all of the advice
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