The Good, the Bad and The Ugly! First "solo" Deal

[Greg Wilding]

Ok so "solo" is a bit of a misnomer, because this is a relationship business and you can't do it alone.  I had plenty of help from investors, hard money lenders, brokers, tenants etc.   But, this was the first deal I put together on my own with only $1000 of my own cash(more on that later).  So the story begins with my first disaster...

The Good

I am a Realtor, so I had been checking the MLS regularly and had even been under contract on a few, but always backed out because of something that didn't quite work or a lack of knowledge on how to solve a particular challenge. Or at least I would talk myself out of it because of some excuse to why it wouldn't work, some real, some exaggerated by me due to fear. The competition on the MLS is rough, and usually I was outbid by one of the 10+ other offers that come with investment opportunities on the MLS. But, I kept at it and finally found one at the upper end of the market($500k+ ARV) with great numbers on paper, and I picked it up in Nov. for $374k. The goal was to fix it over the holiday season and list it at the first of the year and sell it by March or April. I didn't have much money I could put towards this deal, so I had to get creative and I found an awesome partner that I met at a local REIA meet-up who would help finance it. He secured the hard money, brought in $30k of his own cash, and he would oversee the project. I brought the deal, found an investor for the other 30k that we needed to purchase the property and would list it for free. We would both help with lining up contractors and doing some of the work ourselves to maximize our profit.

The place looked great after we were finished!  We were stoked and ready to walk away with $40k in profits, or so we thought... 

The Bad

I got it listed and we waited, and waited and dropped the price again and again.  All the comps showed that homes in that price range were under contract within 10-20 days.  It was showing plenty and we got really good feedback from everyone who went through,  but we weren't getting offers.   When we got to a break even point in our numbers, my partner graciously bought me out of the deal for $0 dollars, and wanted to try another direction with a new realtor. I was fine with that, as we weren't making any profits at the current price and lender fees were starting to hurt.  My partner knew he would probably lose some money but was ok with that because he was able to strike a deal with my investor securing the use of his money for another year.   I was glad the investor was taken care of, but bummed and a little humiliated about losing a deal that I thought would be such a slam dunk!  I had sold many other houses without a hitch, I thought i knew the market and it was a sellers market with homes selling quickly, this should have been easy.   Luckily for me, my partner took on this burden and ended up losing money on this deal but eventually sold it.  I was super grateful that I wasn't out any of my own money and vowed that I would make it up to my partner with another deal and try to erase the sting of failure, but this was definitely a blow to my ego and confidence, could I make this Real Estate business work? 

The Ugly, a good kind of Ugly

Well, you have to learn from your failures, so I started looking again, educating myself more, using better tools (Thanks BP!) and about a year later and after many more double and triple guessing about if the next deal will work, I purchased a small townhouse for $87k from a wholesaler that I met at the REIA meet-ups.

 This sucker was Ugly!  But  I noticed that it didn't need any repairs and I could list it right away as-is for about $110k - $115k for a small profit. I still didn't have much money, so I lined up some hard and private money to purchase it trying to make it so that I didn't have any of my own money in the deal.  My calculation were slightly off, because when i went to closing I realized I needed to keep $1000 of the earnest money I paid in the deal to make it work.  I had seen many sets of closing documents as an agent but I focused more on my commission than the title fees and there were a few that I hadn't accounted for.  I could live with having $1000 tied up for a short time.   It already had a tenant in it that was a good tenant and it just barely was cash-flowing so even if it didn't sale right away, I knew it could float itself.  But the market was still hot and at this price point there are way more buyers as opposed to my first deal so I wasn't worried about finding a buyer.   I listed it right away and got to know the tenant. I discovered he wanted to own, so I offered to sell it to him and he took it.  42 days after purchasing it, I signed it over to the happy tenant/new owner and  netted $13k while my investor made 58% Roi.    The funny thing is the investor was kind of bummed to only make 58% because it was originally offered to him to pay 100% of purchase price and we would split the profits.  However, His other half put the brakes on investing the full amount, hence the hard money.   This actually worked in my favor as I earned way more profit using the hard money loan.  But I was happy to do it either way. 

Now I know this isn't a huge amount, but it is a good start to build some seed money for the next deals that will surely follow!