Wholesaling Part One: Wait -- what is wholesaling again?

What the heck is wholesaling again? Can a person really assign a contract to someone else?  Why in the world would someone want to sell their home at 70% below market value?  The whole thing sounded insane to me, and yet I'd heard stories of people making their entire livings doing just that.  The first thing I decided to do, then, was call my real estate agent, Sam.  Sam was the top seller in our area a few years ago, a quiet, humble guy, and a terrific realtor.  

"Sam," I said.  "I'm interested in buying a rental property, but I don't have any cash right now. I read online that a person can break into real estate by something called wholesaling, and that you don't need a lot of money to get started in it.  Have you heard of anything like this before?" 

"Yeah, sort of," Sam said, vaguely.  "But that kind of thing doesn't really go on in this area. If you don't have money to put down on a rental," he added, "you're probably better off going with something like owner financing."  

We talked about owner financing for a while, but I was disappointed.  If my favorite realtor in the area, a true expert and big money-maker in the field and a nice guy besides, had no idea of any wholesaling practices going on in my area, was this thing that the gurus talk about even real?  Was it a thing?  An actual lucrative thing? Or was wholesaling some kind of real estate unicorn?

I decided to find out.  

Join me as I jump on this wholesaling ship to see if what the gurus and the brains in real estate say is true -- that you can buy a house without your own money, or at least without much of it.  That you can sell a house to someone else and take a fee for putting buyer and seller together, and yes, if you do this a few times each month, you can actually make quite a bit of money.  

I've only started this journey and frankly, I'm skeptical.  But I've learned enough to know that I don't know much, that it's worth a shot, and that I'm going to jump in.  So stick with me as I chronicle my journey. Hold my hand.  Yell at me.  Post comments.  Tell me I'm an idiot, or that I've made mistakes, but tell me to keep going.  Because I have a hunch that this thing is going to work.   

In my next blog post I'll tell you what happened when I accosted a curmudgeonly real estate investor outside the courthouse. He was not very nice, and he was also mean. I felt like a fool for asking him questions about wholesaling.  But I was polite and relentless, and he ended up telling me some interesting things in spite of himself. (Read my next post to find out what he said.)