4 Ways to Maximize ROI in Every Step of the Wholesaling Process

When you operate a real estate wholesaling business, time is more than just money. It’s opportunity. You can only work so many hours a day before you run out of energy, so you have to find the best ways to organize and manage your process if you want to maximize ROI.

Make sure you’re scaling to get better — not just bigger — when working toward higher returns, though. If that’s not your focus, it won’t take long for you to see that you’re working yourself to death for shrinking profit margins and not giving yourself any room to enjoy the freedom you dreamed of when you first started your business.

Get Organized and Get to Work

These four tips can help you maximize your ROI by getting organized and finding the best way of doing things:

1. Check out some of your competitors’ buyers. I mentioned earlier that good real estate wholesaling relies on good buyers. If your competitors consistently outbid you, they probably have better buyers than you do. Making sure you have the best buyers should be a top priority.

Subscribe to competitors’ buyers lists to start getting emails about their available properties. Have your virtual assistant check the list after about a month, look up the new owners of any properties on it, and skip trace that person for his or her number and email address. You just found an investor you know is willing to pay top dollar for future properties.

2. Hire a team to drive for dollars. As you scale, it’s easy to buy lists and blast $30,000 of direct mail at the click of a button. But there is a trade-off between pressing a button and spending a lot of money versus doing a little extra legwork to get higher returns.

On average, bulk direct mailing can net you about 400% ROI. If you drive for dollars instead, the list is more targeted, which means you can expect the ROI on dollars spent mailing to be much higher, with an average of 16,000% ROI.

I know you haven’t driven for dollars since you did your first deal, but consider using technology to build and manage a team of drivers for you. You can develop your own unique list of properties and send a lot less mail, and you can maximize your profit on each one. Chances are, you won’t have a lot of other investors to compete with because your team will have found the properties instead of buying a list online.

3. Vet new hires before you invest in them. Building a team culture is hard if you have even one bad apple. Highly talented people do not want to work with a poor performer, and firing people can really kill morale.

Wondering how you made the mistake of hiring someone who does the bare minimum or routinely shows up late? I’ve made this mistake before! It’s easy for someone to talk a good game during an interview and then not live up to your expectations. If you had known better, you would have done better.

The good news is you can fix your process so it doesn’t happen again! Save yourself time and money by creating hoops for job candidates to jump through before you invest in them as a regular part of your team.

For example, I hire people at $15 an hour to drive for dollars for me. I have potential drivers download my app, and I pay them to add 25 properties within 24 hours. Once they prove that they can do that, I know it’s worth setting up an interview. Whether you’re hiring drivers or other positions, come up with a test project related to the role so you can see who’s serious and understand what it’s like to work with that person before you hire him or her.

4. Make sure all of your processes work together. With tools like Zapier, it’s easy to connect your customer relationship management platform to your dialer, your mail house, and your team members’ phones and email accounts.

When I speak with most operators, I ask how they submit the leads they get while they are out and about on an appointment. Most of them say the acquisitions agent will text or Slack them the lead, but they also admit that most of those leads get forgotten. When your tech devices don’t talk to each other, your team likely loses leads — as a result, customers don’t get the best experience.

After working hard to get where you are today, you deserve some help carrying the load when building on that success. Finding strategic ways to maximize time is the key to maximizing ROI, too. It’s a win-win!