How I Started Wholesaling Real Estate from Afghanistan

[Dan Wilson]

In November 2020 I got notified that I would be leaving my home in Dayton Ohio to deploy for 5 months in Afghanistan. I had 1 month notice before I needed to leave, and it would be spent in training. Like most single people do when they leave for deployment, I packed all of my belongings into a storage unit and found a property manager to rent my house out while I was away. Thanks to COVID-19, I spent two weeks in “Q-Town” in Qatar quarantining before continuing on to Bagram Airfield. What I didn’t know is that I would have to spend an extra week there just waiting for my flight out. As a medic, I had zero downtime since the pandemic started 9 months prior, so I was finally getting to rest… well getting time off anyway.

Q-Town was a prison. We lived in 20-year-old, beaten down, rat-infested trailers with two to a room and nothing but a bunk bed, twin size mattress as old as the trailer, and a metal wall locker. Due to COVID, we were confined behind a chain link fence so we wouldn’t mingle with the rest of the base population. The only good news — there was decent wifi. Since there wasn’t anything else to do, I spent my time wandering down YouTube rabbit holes. I stumbled upon real estate wholesaling. That’s where you find sellers who want or NEED to sell their house, but they haven’t listed it on the market with a real estate agent. You can buy real estate at a discount that way, but it’s often in bad shape. I was intrigued. I had just bought a 4-plex, but only because I had gotten outbid on 8 other properties and finally paid way over the asking price. The cashflow was good, but starting out with negative equity wasn’t ideal. My dream was (still is) to be able to leave the military and travel the world while doing work I love. Wholesaling sounded like a way to increase my rental portfolio and passive income without competing in a seller’s market.

Beachfront Living in Q-Town, Qatar

After two weeks of learning as much as I could on YouTube University while pacing the perimeter of the chain link fence of Q-Town like a caged animal, I had come up with a plan. Since I had moved out of my house and put my things in storage, I had some extra money coming in to hire someone to cold call for me. I posted a job ad in the Philippines and hired a cold caller with some experience in real estate while waiting for my flight out of Q-Town. I had no idea at the time how I was possibly going to buy and sell real estate in Ohio from half way across the world. She started the day I arrived in Afghanistan.

It was off the races from day one. My cold caller Regine had a million questions and I had to run around to get my weapon and armor issued to me and get network access. From the day I arrived, we worked 12 hour days in Afghanistan 7 days a week. The only way we knew what day of the week it was is by the meals they served. Chicken tenders on Mondays, Tacos on Tuesdays, Wings on Wednesdays. Yes, everything was fried and everything arrived frozen. Goodbye healthy eating. It took a couple of weeks to learn my job — I was in charge of the medical laboratory at Bagram, as well as the laboratory consultant for all NATO operations in Afghanistan. That wouldn’t have been too demanding except eliminating COVID was the 4-Star General’s top priority, which meant we were running COVID tests for surveillance day and night and he wanted updates 4 times a week. We kept track of the equipment, supplies, and testing numbers across the theater, to include bases run by the Italians, Germans, and Australians. I slaved away trying to stay on top of COVID testing from 7am-7pm, and then I got to work.

Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan

Due to the time difference — Afghanistan is 9.5 hours ahead of the east coast — as my day was ending, Ohio was just waking up. Regine was patient with me as I spent the evenings creating the systems for her to her job better, coaching her on the calls, and reviewing the leads she was getting. Within a month we had a handful of what seemed to be good leads, the problem was I wasn’t calling them. As someone who absolutely hates talking on the phone, I had to work myself up to make the calls which would sometimes take hours or days. To complicate the situation further, there is no cell service in Afghanistan, shocker! Pro Tip — If you’re going to be out of the country for an extended period of time, switch to T-Mobile to avoid paying $10/day. Good luck trying to get into your bank accounts and signing up for things like Skype when you can’t verify your cell phone number because you can’t receive SMS. Anyway, I had to pay for internet phone service, which lagged horribly and the leads always had a hard time hearing me. What to do? Maybe it was good timing or luck, but I was listening to Brandon Turner on an episode of the Bigger Pockets podcast and he said one simple question changed his entire business model. That question was, “What if it were easy, what would that look like?” That’s when I knew it was time to hire my next employee — an Acquisition Manager.

I found Milton using a paid Facebook Job post ($60), and he took the business to another level. Milton lived in Central America and already had 3 years of experience as a remote Acquisition Manger with another company. He knew how the business worked, what software I needed, and he was excellent on the phone. Within a month of hiring Milton he had gotten 4 deals under contract. We would agree on a price, and I would send the contract via DocuSign for the Seller to digitally sign. I was so excited. I honestly did not think this would work. I had tried so many other business ideas in the past. I tried selling on Amazon, day trading, affiliate marketing, dog walking, and T-shirt printing just to name a few. They say 9 in 10 businesses fail, but I was well beyond 10 so I didn’t have high hopes for this venture. They say entrepreneurship is like a roller coaster, you go from the highest highs to the lowest lows, so you can guess what came next.

Those 4 deals fell through because we couldn’t find a buyer. In fact, the next 2 after that fell through as well. What were we doing wrong? In my defense, it’s difficult to estimate the value and rehab costs of a property you can’t see because you’re on the other side of the planet. I also underestimated the difficulty of finding buyers for deals. ALL of the YouTube videos I watched and Facebook groups I joined said that finding buyers would be a piece of cake. They said, “Just find a deal, and you’ll have a buyer within a day”. Two months went by and we didn’t have any buyers. I found another wholesaler in my area that seemed to have things figured out and I asked him why no one was buying my properties. He asked how big my buyers list was, and I told him it was only 12 people that I had found by posting deals in the local real estate investor Facebook groups. That was my problem. He said I could partner with him. He would find a buyer and we would split the profit 50/50. I wasn’t too happy about giving away so much profit, but something was better than nothing. Within a week he found a buyer for four properties in a rural area that I thought for sure would fall through, and his buyer was going to pay $32,500 more than I had them under contract for. After a couple extensions and hang ups with the title company, I closed on my first wholesale deal the month I left Afghanistan with a $16,250 assignment fee. It wasn’t enough to make up for everything I had spent, but it got the ball rolling and now that ball has momentum. Despite working nonstop 12-hour days, mortar attacks and exercises, and getting called in to the trauma bay to run labs and issue blood for mostly Afghan soldiers with gunshot and blast injuries, I was able to build a business, hire my first employees, and close my first wholesale deal while deployed in Afghanistan.

My First Assignment Fee

Since then I partnered up with my good friend Max and we closed on a 6-unit apartment building just 5 days after I got home to Ohio. We decided that in this hot market our best strategy is actually to list properties with an agent, and now we’re under contract to sell that property for a very nice profit. It’s been 2 weeks since my return from Afghanistan and we have 9 more deals under contract, we’re hiring a second Acquisition Manager, and working on building out more marketing channels.