David: Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Mike: David.  

David: Hey there, buddy. I'm doing good, man. Welcome back to the Discount Property Investor podcast, guys. I am your host, David Dodge with my co-host Mike Slane. Hey, Mike. 

Mike: Hey hey everybody. Thanks so much for joining us today. 

David: That's right.  

Mike: We are excited to be talking to you. We're excited to be talking about real estate and to be doing real estate. It's-- it's not everyone who gets to wake up and do what they want every day. And I want to be buying and investing real estate and wholesaling it, and buying rentals. And it's fun.  

David: It is fun.  

Mike: It's very, very-- we're very fortunate. And again, we like to have that attitude of what is it? Gratitude--. 

David: Attitude of gratitude. 

Mike: And just recognize how lucky we are to be doing what we do. So, again, just hopefully you share some of that mindset. And if you are in a bad place, just remember, there's a lot of things to be grateful for. 

David: That's right. Always stuff to be grateful for. Health. Health is one of them, you know. So--. 

Mike: Yeah, we woke up on the right side of the durance right.  

David: That's right. 

Mike: And you look up on the right side of the dirt and you know, you're listening to this podcast. So hopefully you're trying to better yourself, get a little bit of real estate education. And hopefully we can share with you today some helpful tips. So that is kind of our plan. We want to share something about wholesaling. Real brief. I always like to take it back to who are we talking to, who's our target listener? And it usually is the newer real estate investor who comes on and is listening to us. And I like to put it in just a real quick summary. What is wholesaling? Right. So-- 

David: Please. 

Mike: Wholesaling, Dave, is when we buy a property, residential real estate, when we buy a property at a great price, and we sell it at a good price. Now the magic happens because we're able to double close these. We're able to close these on the same day often times here without actually bringing money to the table. So we are able to buy and sell a product, make money on it without actually having to bring our own funds. And the reason real estate is so exciting a product is because it has higher prices, which means we can make higher spreads. And that's what's so exciting about wholesaling real estate, is the fact you can make a lot of money very quickly. Yeah, very, very cool. So that's wholesaling real estate in a nutshell. We've got tons of content out there at FreeWholesaleCourse.com. It walks you through it basically step by step, right?  

David: That's right. Check it out, guys. If you haven't been over there yet, check it out.   

Mike: Let's jump into today's content, Dave, what are we chatting about today related to wholesaling? 

David: So we just did a wholesale deal. We did three deals last week. We cashed-- we got paid on-- so we closed on three, got paid on two, and we got paid on the third one earlier this week. So today is Wednesday. So we had a closing Thursday, a closing Friday, another closing Friday, but didn't fund until Monday. So we did-- had a couple of deals recently over the last few days, and I wanted to just do a quick case study on one of these deals. So we ended up making $9550. 83 on this deal.  

Mike: Boom! 

David: Mike, you never saw the deal, which is awesome. 

Mike: I love being at the point in the company where I'm at, where I really-- I don't see most of them. It's probably about-- I don't know, maybe a third of the properties I'll even end up going and seeing now. 

David: That's right. 

Mike: Which is pretty fun--. 

David: The way it should be, though. Right person, right seat. Focus our efforts where they're best allocated. And right now, you know, Mike's really doing well with getting our rentals online, and adding properties to the BRRRR. And me and a couple other of our teammates are focused more on the wholesaling side. So it's really, really great. So, Mike, I'm going to kind of be talking a little bit about this property because I went to it, but I didn't go inside. So even though you never saw it, even though you never spoke to the seller, even though you never spoke to the buyer or had to do anything on it, I didn't either, other than happened to go look at it.  

Mike: Physically look at it.  

David: I didn't get out of the car. 

Mike:
And that's the question, Dave, is why did you even bother to go physically look at it? 

David: Yeah okay, so this is a little this-- is kind of a unique deal. And the reason that it's a unique deal, I guess it's more of a wholetale than it is a wholesale.  

Mike: Full disclosure 

David: Full disclosure. Yeah. So this is a-- call it a 10K wholetale case study. The gross that we made was $9550.83.   

Mike: So what do you mean by wholetale? 

David: So the reason I call it a wholetale is because we actually bought the house without a buyer lined up, right? However, this was up in North St. Louis city, and it's in a place that we don't typically invest, right? Typically, I would never buy a property up in North St. Louis City. It's just not in our area of expertise. Also, it doesn't meet any of the criteria of deals that we typically buy. However, the purchase price on this with all costs, our A to B to buy it was only $4300.31. That includes the closing costs, That includes, you know, prepaid. I mean, that's everything. We took possession of the property and got the deed transferred into our name. Now for 4300 we thought, hey, we can make two to three times our money on this, maybe more. So the risk of buying was very low. And typically when we buy, Mike, I have to have either your approval and or our other partner Bill's. In this case, I think I sent pictures to you guys and you probably just said, it's $4300, Dave, we know what you're doing. Just do it.  

Mike: That's exactly what happened.  

David: You didn't even see these pictures, right? 

Mike: So Travis actually, and said, okay, we'll get eyes on it.  

David: Travis is our acquisition guy, right? So I went up there and this was a big ass house, man. It was a big house, was on a nice street. All the other houses on the street were big. A lot of-- it's kind of a rundown area. Again, nothing negative or personal, you know, against North St. Louis. However, it's just doesn't meet our metrics. It's not the safest part of town and it doesn't really make great rentals. So, again, we didn't buy it for our own portfolio. We bought it to make money and flip. Now, we listed this on our own off market website, and it was up there for a couple days and we didn't have a whole lot of traffic on that. 

Mike: I wasn't paying attention, Dave Can we rewind a second. 

David: Sure. Yeah,  

Mike: Where did we get this lead. Do you remember where we got this lead?

David: That's a great question. Let me take a look over here in REIBlackbook, our CRM that tracks all of this stuff. And it looks like the lead came from-- I'll tell you right now, Driving for dollars.  

Mike: Perfect 

David: So we use Deal Machine to get this lead. That's how we do all of our Driving for hours, guys, we use Deal Machine. If you guys want a free trial of the app, check out the show notes below, or just the content below this video. But we use Driving for dollars, and it looks like this lead was entered in on March 6th. Today is May 13th. So from the time that we entered this lead into our system and the time that we closed it out was just a little over a month. It was about five weeks, right.  

Mike: It's about as quick as they'll go. I mean, honestly, on a real estate transaction, we talk about, you know, we can close fast in as little as three days or seven days, whatever you whatever you're saying. But a lot of times there's a lot of lead time on real estate transactions because we have to run title, things like that. So this one did take a little bit of time to close. But again, it was a pretty quick, the person was ready to sell. They were motivated. We were able to call and get it under contract and we were able to close it pretty quick.  

David: That's exactly what we did. We drove for dollars. We used Deal machine. We took that information over to Bach Lead Stacker, which is our favorite place to skip trace as well as cold text. And what we did is we cold texted the seller. They said they were interested in selling and we needed to get some eyes on the property. So our acquisition guy lives about an hour south. So I was like, hey, it's only about 20 minutes from the office. I'll go take a look at it. I went up and took a look at it, but I didn't get out of the car because it was just a neighborhood that I didn't really feel that safe in. And B, the price was so low that it didn't really matter what the condition of the house was. I just wanted to make sure that it was standing and that there was, in fact, a house there that matched up with what I saw on the Google Maps and Google Street View. And it did, it looked the exact same. I did not go in this house. 

Mike: Did Travis go in? 

David:  Nope. Now, Travis was the one that did the Driving for dollars via the app. He's part of our team. So he generated the lead, sent it to me again. I skip traced it and had another team member cold text, and and then once the seller was identified and motivation was also identified, that's when the ball went back to Travis, who's our acquisition guy. He called and said, hey, you know, I think they were asking, let me look here.  

Mike: So this is--.  

David: They were asking seven grand originally. And we went back and we said, no, we can do it for I think 3500 or 4000 will pay cash. We don't need any due diligence or anything like that. And they agreed. 

Mike: What's really neat to me is that so-- Dave and I, we--. 

David: No lock box, we didn't need to, the doors were open,  

Mike: We primarily wholesale in St. Louis. We don't do a lot of virtual type wholesaling. And this one is very close--. 

David: Similar to a virtual--. 

Mike: A virtual model where you don't actually go in the house. You're never actually physically there. So we're getting a little bit closer to that, which again--. 

David: Now I want to back up real quick, Mike. We saw other properties on the street selling for ten to twenty thousand in just terrible shape. Again, we are picking this up for I think it was $3400 all in. So, you know, we kind of took a gamble, a little gamble on this. Here's what I got to do. I got to go back because my info's over here. Took a little gamble on it, but we just figured, you know,  hell with it. Like if there's other properties that need a complete gut rehab that are similar sized square size and square foot, same age as well, that are selling for 10 to 20 grand, and we can buy this for 4300, like it would be very difficult for us to not break even. Right. I mean, there's other comps selling for two to four times what we're buying this for and they're in as condition or worse. 

Mike: I remember looking at the comps.  

David: So, you know, my whole thing was, well, it's going to be hard for me to not get my money back. And, you know, worse-- that's worst case scenario. I'm really shooting for more like two to three X on my money, you know, and this is going to be very simple. It's going to be quick. So, again, we closed on it. I didn't go inside. I just drove by. The pictures are-- the side of the house. When I drove by, it looked identical to Google. It was still standing. I never went inside. I never placed a lock box. We put it up on our website and we didn't have a ton of off market track traffic. We had a little, and then we listed it on the MLS. And within two days we had it under contract with an investor that's buying in that area, via an agent and under contract. So we went in and we said, hey, no problem. We gave them like one or two days to inspect. It was very short and we made them put down a two thousand dollar nonrefundable deposit. So if they weren't even if they didn't buy and they backed out, that would have cut the cost of the purchase in half, because we only paid 4300 and change for it, we would have gotten two thousand out of them. So we felt very, very good about their offer. Now their offer was fourteen thousand, right? So what ended up happening was the A to B and again I'm going to use A to B and B to C to refer to the purchases, right? We are the B in this scenario, right? The A is the seller. We're the B wholesalers / new owners and then the C is our buyer. So when a wholesale transaction, you don't typically have to buy, in this scenario, though, in order to get a great price, we had to give them no contingencies, no inspections, and we had to just pull the trigger. But we were able to get a good discount. That's what we do, Mike. We trade convenience for a discount.

Mike: So in that, I think explains already my question for you, which is why did we close it? Why do we not wholesale it? 

David: Because they wanted seven grand for it and we weren't willing to pay seven grand for it. And they basically said, if you guys want more time, here's the price. But if you can close it like in a week or next week, essentially, here's our bottom dollar. And it just made sense. 

Mike: Yeah. So they basically they weren't willing to give us more time. They were they were motivated. 

David: That was the convenience that we provided was the time, right. So, you know, that's what we do, guys. We trade a discount for convenience. And the convenience that we were giving them was time. It wasn't so much cost. It was time. They wanted to be done with it. They wanted their money. They wanted their money now. All right. So what ended up happening is, is we did buy it. We did have to pay for insurance for, you know, three weeks while it was going to close. That maybe cost us two to two hundred and fifty bucks. And it's included in our forty three zero one there. That's included. Go ahead. 

Mike: Why do we get insurance on it, Dave?  

David: We got insurance on it because it's only a couple hundred bucks. We knew that-- and that's the minimum, right. Even if you own it for a day, usually they charge a quarter of the premium. But we knew that if this thing were to catch fire and burn down the cost of removing all the rubble, filling in the hole, fencing off the property would have been more money than the purchase price. 

Mike: So it's liability? 

David: It was liability.  

Mike: Liability is what we want, because, again, if somebody goes on there and hurts themselves or whatever, we want to have that property insured. 

David: There was probably crackheads living in this house. 

Mike: Exactly. 

David: When we bought it and when we sold, I don't know, I never went and I don't care. Right. But you're absolutely right. We did get some insurance on it because we didn't want anyone to get hurt. Or if it did burn down, the city would have then said, hey, you know, House Sold Easy guys, Mike and Dave, you know, you guys fix this, make it make it safe, you know, tear it out, fill in the hole, you know, put up a fence, whatever that might be.
So we decided to do that and it just made sense. And then the closing came around, again that was last Thursday or Friday, and with all of the costs associated with it, we got a check for $13'852.14. So if you take out what the cost, the 4300 and change from the $13'852.14, that equals $9550.83 or call it 9500. 

Mike: That's a good payday. 

David: So we have made $9500 off of a house that we bought, never went inside. Listed on the MLS. It's called a wholetale, guys sold. Now we paid our self back the money that we had invested in that deal, and that's why it's 9500 and not 13'800 because we did have some cost.
But that was the purchase, that included closing costs. That included the insurance, too, right? So that was a gross or-- I'm sorry, a net profit of $9500, right? 9500 dollars. So the lesson to be learned here is, you know, driving for dollars gets deals. This deal wasn't on any of the lists that we had previously bought when we added into our system, it was a new lead. So one of our favorite lead sources is Driving for dollars. And if you're not Driving for dollars, get a free demo or a free seven day free trial in the link below, guys. We will drop a link to Deal Machine. We love it. We absolutely love using it. Number two, we skip traced it and cold texted it with Batch Leads. Batch Leads is amazing. I do all my skip tracing there. We do our cold texting there, and then we even export from there, landline numbers and we cold call those. So I don't see any notes in here about us cold calling this particular lead, but I'm confident that we skip traced it and cold texted it, and that's how we were able to connect the seller with the agent, who is Travis, who is the one that listed. Go ahead, Mike. 

Mike: Yeah. So I was just going to say that, I mean, even if we didn't do the cold call. We did cold text. And after we text, once we find motivation, we always pick up the phone. And Travis is awesome at this. I mean, he's he's going to he is just going to hound the person. I mean, he's going to keep calling until he can get a hold of them. So I know for a fact we did obviously call the person at some point. It's just a matter of when that that's--. 

David: When we bought this one, typically, we'll put utilities in our name, but we didn't with this one. We didn't do trash. Yeah, I mean, sewer gets transferred at purchase, but it also gets transferred at sale. So we only had it in our name for, you know, maybe three weeks, two weeks, probably two weeks. So we'll get a bill for that. That'll be very minimal. But there wasn't any other-- the water wasn't on, gas wasn't, electric, wasn't on, at least that I don't know of, because, again, I didn't go inside, but we never turned it into our name anyway. So if it was in someone else's, not our problem, it wasn't on not our problem. So that's really, really awesome. So the only cost that we had to purchase at were the price, the closing costs, little bit of sewer, which we haven't even got the bill yet. And then last but not least would have been the insurance. So wholesaling real estate in places that you don't typically buy. So, again, you know, the strategy with this one was to never hold it. It was we can get a really great price. We see comps that are two to four times going, you know, selling on the MLS what this one could be purchased for. And they're in worse condition, if not the same condition than this. So what we saw was opportunity. We didn't see risk. We saw opportunity. And again, it was a little bit of a gamble because we had no guarantee that we were going to be able to sell it for what we thought we were going to sell for. But sure enough, it sold really quickly, two days, two or three days. 

Mike: We mitigate that risk though, Dave. Like you said, we saw the other comps on there, we're not going to buy it if we didn't see other things selling in terrible shape, like--  so, yes, there is some risk, but it's minimized by doing your due diligence, by doing your research on these things. When we put our cash up, that's very important. 

David: Absolutely right. Awesome. So that's it, guys. I mean, that's the case study. We made almost ten thousand dollars. That was one of three deals that we actually closed last week. The other two were roughly ten thousand each as well. I think one was eight and one was maybe nine, give or take. So we brought in about $27'000 in wholesale profits last week. We did three total and this is just one of them. So this one was more of a wholetale than a wholesale but very, very similar. So again, guys, get out there. How do we find the lead? We drove for dollars. How do we contact them? We contact them, we skip, trace them, we cold texted them. They didn't even want to show it. They were just like, go look at it. It's open. Like, that's how motivated they were. So when I went there, I probably should have got out of the car and peeked in. But it didn't-- I wasn't there to see the finish. The finishes of the property. I didn't care if the floor was missing. All I wanted to see was, was the brick still intact and was there a roof? I didn't care if the roof had holes in it. I just wanted to see. Because, again, that determined that this is something that, you know, is fixable or if it's not right. So that was it. I just did the drive by and then I gave the thumbs up. We purchased it, literally listed it the same day that we closed on it, maybe that evening and then two days later we had it under contract. So, I mean, it was very, very smooth, very streamlined. And again, we did have to fund it, right? But we still could have made money if we would have paid more and wholesale it, it just would have been not a $9000 spread. It would have been a four or five thousand dollar spread. But we saw opportunity. We said we can't lose. If anything, we're going to break even on this price. Let's do it. And that's it. It was that simple. There really wasn't that many moving parts, guys. A lot of people complicate real estate investing. They think that it's so difficult and in fact, it's so simple. There's a couple of steps. Let's run through them. Market for motivated sellers, get them on the phone, seek motivation, make an offer or go view the property, make another offer, get the property under contract, market the property to your cash buyers, which could also mean listing it on the MLS, take it to a title company, close it, get paid. That's it. That's the entire business. Everyone wants to over complicate it, but it's extremely simple. Now I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's extremely simple. So where would most people find this to be difficult? Well, it's consistency in marketing, in my opinion. They're not doing enough marketing to get their phone ringing enough, and then they get frustrated because they're not getting enough appointments or not running any appointments. And how can they make offers if they don't have any appointments or they're not talking to people? It always starts at marketing. It starts and ends with the marketing, especially in this business. That's all I got, Mike, anything you want to add?  

Mike: I love it, man. That was a great recap. Let's wrap up.  

David: Love it. All right, guys, until next time. Signing off.