Low or No Money Down Investing....A blessing and a curse

[William Brown]

My partner @Oliver Wolcott and I have just started wholesaling in Winchester, VA. Why did we pick wholesaling? It seems to be the only logical path for two starters who have little money. Assigning a contract for a fee and not putting any down? Sounds good.

However, as the 8-12 hour days of work go by, we find that we more than make up for the lack of money we put into marketing and selling efforts with our time.  Let me explain and can possibly add value/perspective for some others starting out here.

Instead of spending $500-1000 on lists and direct mail, we took action and drove for dollars for about 6 hours. We compiled ~50 addresses of maintenance - deferred houses and run down properties. We plugged them all into a google sheets account on the cloud we both have access to, then moved on to the next step.

Because we are just getting started taking action, we don't have any rock solid connections with local agents yet. (That's one of our top priorities right now however is connecting with them). So we purchased a whitepages.com subscription for $20 a month for 200 searches. We are reverse searching the addresses and finding contact information for the current and previous owner, and plugging all that into our excel type sheet. Then we go on realtor.com/zillow,etc and find the Bed/Bath, sq.ft, lot size, year built, and plug that in as well. Then once we have that basic information, the fun begins.

Then my partner and I sit down and go down the list, cold calling and emailing the multiple possible contacts whitepages spit out for each house. One issue is that whitepages keeps inactive phone numbers and emails in their records, so at least half of our calls never ring and a decent amount of emails get bounced back. I can't complain for this strategy, because the $0.10 it costs for each whitepages search, and the gas it took to drive and find these addresses, means our property acquisition cost is very low. (That is, if we don't value our time. Which we do, but we are counting it as every call we make and every house we research is another chance to learn more.)

So that is the dilemma, and until we find a better method for such a low cost as well, then we will keep trudging through the "Number you called is no longer in service"s and the "I don't know what property that is you are talking about but it ain't mine"s until we hit gold.

We are also going to purchase ~50 bandit signs to place around winchester in hopes that we get some calls with interest in selling their house, as opposed to trying to shoot fish in a barrel blindfolded as we are right now.

Thank you for reading, hopefully this perspective provided some value to some who are also considering the cheapest way of getting into REI, and if you have any tips or tricks I'm all ears.