Acquiring Property Deals…

My father was a very shrewd businessman, one of the best i knew, and one principle he always taught me was that “you make your money when you BUY something, not when you sell”. Now, I get that you need to sell something to realise the profit, but essentially what he meant was that if you buy anything at the right price, then making a profit once you sell is easy.

So, other than purchasing properties at retail, through realtors in the states, another good option for the savvy, experienced investor is Wholesalers.

Now in the scheme of real estate in the US, Realtors are essential on the “Retail” side of sales, and Wholesalers are on the “Wholesale” side of sales. Here in Australia, we generally don’t have the wholesale market as much, unless you are a larger developer etc looking at more commercial or larger residential blocks for subdivision

Wholesalers may not be someone you will be able to get access to up front, it might take some time in the market to seek out and find these guys, but can be handy to know a couple.

On the flip side, you must also be careful with wholesalers. They often may not be as reliable or honest as Realtors (that is if you can say all real estate agents are honest?!) but there are a lot less rules and regulations around wholesalers

I would certainly still use my Realtor (at least for a time until you have more experience in the region) to deal with the wholesaler, visit and walk through the properties and negotiate on your behalf, just to help keep the wholesaler all above board so to speak

Generally, you may not know a particular person who is a wholesaler so it is often a matter of finding them. Your realtor may know one – hell some realtors are wholesalers themselves, but I would be careful here, as in that case you would no longer have an “arm’s length” relationship and the realtor may not be working in your best interest and could be getting kickbacks from the wholesaler to sell the properties, just watch out for this.

To find a wholesaler, sometimes Mr Google is your friend 🙂 If you type into a google something along the lines of “buy homes in Cleveland Ohio” for instance, this will bring up a number of listings pertaining to Cleveland. Most will be realtors, but you will find scattered throughout this wholesalers as well. Can be good to get onto a couple of wholesalers mailing lists and they will then send through deals to you.

Our US Property fix and flip course also contains more information so if you’re interested – please give us a call below.