Military Pilot to Million Dollar Wholesale Operation in 3.5 Years

[William Allen]

I was recently reminded of a post @Arianne L. did on her success in real estate and when I went to that post again I saw how many people had been affected by it, so inspiring! Then I just happened to look at how many times I had posted on BP and I was at 999 posts since I joined. Well, what could be better for my 1,000 post than to tell my story and hopefully inspire some people to think bigger than they are right now and go for it!

4 years ago I decided to really take real estate investing seriously and try and build a real business around it. I had been a weekend warrior landlord for a few years and flipped 1 house the year before when I committed to taking this leap. I had a full time job flying for the Navy at the time and thought it would be a good idea to start building a business. Essentially, it wasn't long before I had 2 full time jobs! I was actually on the BP podcast shortly after I started getting serious about REI that you can check out here if you want some more details. I think it will be funny for me to go back and listen to that episode now to see how far I have come since then, we always look at what the next milestone is and rarely do we take time to look back and appreciate how far we have come.

I think the best way to lay all this out is to outline what the results are and then go back and state the lessons learned from a lot of it year to year.

Original Plan 

December 2015 – Build a business to flip 12 houses a year netting $30k per deal making me $360k a year. Retire from the Navy at 20 years and enjoy both incomes.

2016 Highlights

Hired my first person as an assistant to handle lead intake and admin support

Jan - Apr: $18k spent and no income yet

April 18: Closed my first deal and made $9,825 on a wholesale fee

May: Did another wholesale deal making $9,900

June: Closed 6 wholesale deals for a total of $55,086.21

…….

Dec (biggest month): Closed 14 deals for a total of $111,767.18

The total in 2016 was 67 deals, 12 flips and 55 wholesale deals for a total gross profit of $667k. By the month of December I had scaled up to 4 people working with me and we did $111,767.18 that month. So, we were on track to be a 7 figure business if we could keep that going!

2017 Highlights

Jan: 14 deals for a total of $105,659.66 – second month in a row!

Feb: We were up and running in a second virtual market that I had only been to once

Apr: We closed our first deal in that new market for a $15,100 assignment fee, had 6 people working for the company now and I LEFT MY FULL TIME JOB WITH THE NAVY. More about this later.

Jul: Biggest month we had ever had, closed 28 deals for a total of $190,898.89 in gross profit

The total for the year was 183 deals and $1,315,795.40 in gross profits. About 20% of them were flips and the other 80% wholesale deals.

Hired a COO to run the company in December 2017.

2018 Highlights

Jan: 8 deals closed and $19,493.61 profit (ouch!) We decided to flip a ton more in 2018 and were trying to flip 50 houses this year.

Feb: Up and running in a 3rd market. 11 deals with $57,400 profit – again we bought more of these houses!

Mar: 16 deals for $237,033.88 profit so we were back in business

Apr: Closed our first deal in new market on the 25th of this month

Aug: Best month ever to date, 25 deals for $359,875 profit

Total for the year was 187 deals and $2,351,452.59 in gross profits. Similar 80/20 ratio of wholesales to flips

2019

Goal at the start of this year was $3.5M. This post is already too long so I will do another one toward the end of the year to tell you all how we are doing! 

Image of all month to month over these 3 years (through Sep 18) so you can see the roller coaster it is!  Something happened each time to make that line go up and down, usually people issues.

This post became way too long so I will post my lessons learned below it...