Wholesaling/Investing Part-time

[Tyson S.]

I have a rewarding day job but I always have the itch to "do more". I'm not in a position to do cash investing, yet, so the next logical step is wholesaling in my opinion. My background is in building design and construction, although on the commercial scale, I still think it will help me.

Besides the inexperience obstacle, I'm having a hard time concentrating my free time effectively to get the ball rolling. I do have capital to spend on marketing and the motivation to do the work.

I understand the process of how wholesaling works, my biggest question is how do I use my time effectively? Right now, I seem to be spread out between a lot of different "startup" tasks and am not actually get much accomplished.

I know I need to market, setup a buyers list, find title companies, find an agent. But when I split up what I need to do for say, marketing, (website, getting lists, determining who I should market to and how, budgeting) I get very little actually done with my free time. It's paralysis by analysis.

I guess I'm looking for help on narrowing my focus in wholesaling to get things started and experience under my belt. Such as : should I skip the website and just direct mail absentee owners while building a buyers list and finding a title company to work with? I already have two realtor friends on board so I have MLS access to do comps (and other help down the road).

I've already decided to skip a lot of the business formalities for now (name, LLC, cards, etc) and just work under my name for the time being. Perhaps that's not a good idea and I should focus on that? I feel like that adds no value while taking up a lot of time.

[Andy J.]

I don't know anything about starting an LLC in Iowa, but for me here in Colorado it takes about 15 minutes and $50 to setup an LLC over the internet. Of course this doesn't include the operating agreement, but you can take care of that soon enough. Personally I don't want my name on anything, not worth the risk.

I wouldn't put the title company high on the list of things to do. If you're building a buyer's list, hopefully you're finding experienced buyers which means they probably would prefer to use their title company (great, now you know of an investor friendly title company, and without doing all the leg work!).

I'm sure some people will disagree with me but I strongly believe your marketing is vastly more important than building your buyer's list. I've always said that if you have a truly good deal, buyers will come out of the woodwork to snatch it up! Des Moines is a big city, I'm sure there's a lot of folks looking for a good deal.

As a purchaser of wholesales I get a lot of phone calls of people wanting to add me to their buyer's list. Almost none of them every bring me a deal, but I'm sure if they devoted that much time in actually looking for one then we would have a lot more to talk about. If your state discloses sales info to the public then it shouldn't be hard to get a good start on a buyer's list.

If you do any networking at your local REI clubs it shouldn't be hard to find a good agent to work with. I would focus more on finding deals yourself through your own marketing. Once the ball is rolling (marketing is in play) then you'll have a lot more incentive to do what needs to get done.