Getting one's start in Wholesaling.....Courses and Books?

[Kyle Varner]

There are lots of different courses out there that purport to teach you how to wholesale.  Now, I don't want to be a wholesaler.  I want to build my own portfolio by means of buying, rehabbing, refinancing, etc.  I've bought a couple deals from wholesalers, and it works out, but when I see the assignment fee that I'm paying, it just makes sense that I should go out and find my own deals--I'll have way more equity and my portfolio will be way healthier in terms of profitability and equity.

There's a lot that goes into finding one's own deals--marketing for the leads, following up with the leads, getting them under contract.  It is no easy thing.  I'd love to get a guide that shows me how to set this up and get started.  I also don't really want to pay $3K (I saw one such course) for educational materials that may simply be available for free or may not even be that valuable.  I'm also not terribly interested in learning about marketing my deals to other investors, because if its good enough to sell to someone else, then its certainly good enough to keep in my portfolio.  So, yeah--I want to set up my marketing operation like the wholesalers do but not actually assign my contracts.

So, what's a guy in my position to do?  I need a website, CRM with autoresponder, call center, contracts, scripts, direct mail service provider, list vendor....and there are services out there that offer this, but they are not cheap and I want to verify quality.  Could anyone suggest how I can evaluate this, and the way to start out?  I'd prefer to minimize the amount of tuition I pay in the school of hard knocks!