Starting out in Utah

[Jeremy Eisenstat]

Hello all,

Jeremy here from Utah County.

I’ve been doing a ton of reading and studying about investing for a while now and I’m excited to get started. BiggerPockets seems like a fantastic community of investors.

I’m leaning towards wholesaling to start out but I’ve heard that’s difficult in Utah but also possible. I’ve also read some posts about some new stricter laws in regards to wholesaling and I’d really like to learn what I can and can’t do and which title companies are the best to work with, or if that makes a difference. I’d really love to fix and flip and buy long term rentals but I just don’t have the cash yet and I understand that hard money lenders are very expensive for new investors.

Any tips or legal advice for this area would be very helpful!

Thanks in advance!

[Blair Poelman]

Wholesaling is a hard place to start - very possible, but it's tough.  It's an attractive idea because you have a relatively small cash outlay, and the mechanics of a wholesale deal are relatively simple, but make no mistake - it is difficult to find long term success wholesaling, especially In UT.  Again, it's possible, but really tough.

There are discussions taking place right now with the UT Division of Real Estate of how to handle wholesalers / wholesaling - both with and without licensing.  There are a lot of real estate brokers involved with the state legislature, and wholesaling is somewhat frowned upon by many brokers so I believe that strategy is going to get squeezed at the state level at some point in the near future - but as of right now it's still kind of wild-wild-west with lots of grey area.

The title co you work with doesn't really make any huge difference.  Title is fairly heavily regulated so really you just want to find a title agent that is cool and easy to work with, has good pricing, and takes good care of you and your deals.