My first wholesale deal completed (ughhh)

[Nathan Paisley]

So last jan 2, 2012 I decided to change my life. I said I'm goin all in. I chose wholesaling as the stepping stone to being filthy rich in a matter of weeks! Yeah I got duped like most people... I've always been a hard worker and a dedicated employee for the last 12 years at the restaurant I work at as a bartender.

I spent hours upon hours reading Biggerpockets, whatching youtube videos and listening to audio books. It's now february and my brother and I get our llc, make business cards, get Facebook page, buy freedomsoft which works pretty well if you're computer savvy. We found a title company and asked if they do assignment and simultaneous closings they said they did. Everything is place to start marketing for thousands of dollars in just a few weeks! We bought 100 blue and white 12x18 bandit signs and started to put them up. It took us about 2 hours of driving around our major locations. I get home 2 hours later and bam I have 2 phone calls on my google phone #. 1 was a realtor and the other was a free n clear property in Camden NJ, 30 mins from where I put up signs. So we schedule an appointment and get to the property. WOWOWOWOW! It was a 3 bed 2 bath brick row home with roof caving in, also had a squatter in there with no running water, heat or electric! Ever see the tv show hoarders? My brother and I are like what the #^*%+!! How do we honestly think we can put an offer in for this and truly sell it for a profit! The seller says she wants 60k I almost lost it! We offered 10,500$. Our first offer! She immediately says, no thanks and walks away. My brother and I are like, wow we dodged a bullet that would of been impossible to sell!

So we're doing direct mailings and we did more bandit signs but went bigger and with black and yellow this time. March goes by no deals, April's goes by no deals but tons of talking to sellers and checking out properties. May comes around and guess who calls, you betcha good ol Camden. So my brother and I have gotten better at negotiating since our first interaction and agree on 10,500$. Stuck to our guns we did!

Now I'll shorten this up because I could go on forever.

Run a title search and find out the property was deeded over to a dead family member 5 years after she died 12 years ago! Needless to say we had to get an addendum and its now October. Weeks are flying by as we try to clear this up. Meanwhile we had a buyer agree to buy the property from us off of Craigslist and made a huge newbie mistake! We didn't get a deposit and trusted the buyer. Ouch... We finally get the title clear and the buyer backed out with 2 weeks left on our contract. We also learn that the title company will not do assignment or simultaneous closings after months of working with us. Now we have 2 weeks to find a buyer AND a new title company. Being in the restaurant biz I picked up a few names I thought I could call. 2 days later I had a buyer and title co.

What else could go wrong right? We agreed to sell the property at 15,000$ and buyer pays closing costs. Turns out the buyer was a noob as well. He didn't realize there are taxes and other fees when purchasing a HOUSE! He had the cash but no checking account or savings account! And tried to pay with a starters check. We had to have him wire the money in...
Blah blah blah we end up completing the deal with 1 hour left in the day before the contract expired. Just to get the deal done we split closing costs and ended up making 3,800$ on our first deal 11 months later!!

So much for thousands in a few weeks... The moral of they story is never give up! I can only imagine how many people would have said, enough... after a few weeks of dealing with this situation. I can honestly say I learned more about RE in this one deal then I could of reading and reading about it and not taking action.

Since then I have another one under contract and 2 more I'm confident I can get under contract.
I know this is long but I also know it is very easy to give up and just be comfortable in the life you live now. My brother and I proved that under serious deadlines we can move mountains. There's always a way!

Nathan