All Forum Posts by: Chris Gould

 I appreciate your input here Will, especially with you being an agent. It 100% exists on a spectrum. Some of my "competitors" will get a house under contract with no intention of holding the agreed price and then on the 30th day of their 30 day contract, they come back demanding a huge reduction or they cancel out the contract. They are wasting the sellers valuable time. I guess this goes for any type of business. You can be slimy and get deals done or act with integrity and accept that you will lose some short term money but gain long term success by having an upstanding brand.

 Lynette this was great advice. Thank you for sharing! I need to demand a higher level of accountability from my team overall. 

Hey Johnny, thanks for the great response. To your question: 

What does your operation look like? Virtual wholesaling set up. We send direct mail and text/cold call for leads. My remote acquisitions person gets the contract without ever seeing the house. Then my dispositions managers partners the deal up with an investors. And then my TC works out all the details to get it to the finish line. 

How many cities? Just one, Indianapolis, IN. 

How many ppl on your team? 5 including myself. Acquisitions Rep, Dispositions Rep, TC/Integrator, and a lead assistant.

Do they generate their own leads? A little bit but I'd say it's 90% leads I provide to them and 10% they bring on their own.

How do you go about providing support, so they can close more? I haven't audited my acquisition rep's calls at all. I think this is the biggest area lacking accountability. I literally audited 2 random calls yesterday and realized she didn't even give the seller an offer. When I inquired why, I got a bogus reason and demanded that she follow up and give him an offer. She called him and he agreed to our anchor price! Crazy. My mentor told me "delegation is only true delegation with inspection".....

When I'm buying property at steep discounts, I've had people ask me "isn't that predatory, buying someone's house for 'less' than it's worth?"

It's something worthy of consideration. I've meditated on it myself because it made me mad when the person said this. But why did it make me mad? Was there a part of me deep inside that was afraid he was right? Possibly. I needed to dig deeper and really come to terms with the service my wholesaling company offers to sellers. 

One of our core tenets within my company is to "only help people who need help." So I knew, at least on paper, we were focused on helping people. I've heard the stories of people crying when we agreed to take their problem property off their hands. But what I kept coming back to was the term "predatory." How much equity is appropriate to give up to get someone out of a tough situation and get them paid in cash within 7, 10, 14 days? I've had deals where, for all my efforts, I only made $500. Other times we've made over $40,000 on a single wholesale deal. Is $40,000 too much? When does the profit from a single deal become too much and move into predatory waters? 

As I considered all of these things, an analogy came to mind...

Sometimes you're sick and need to go to the doctor. You call in to the office, and schedule an appointment, if you can get one. Let's say you have to wait 3 days to see the doctor. If you're not highly motivated or extremely sick, you can probably wait that time and would much rather only pay your copay of $40 to see the doctor. 

Now on the other hands, let's say your are violently ill and need medical attention immediately. In this situation, you'll probably call an ambulance despite it costing upwards of $1,000 for a single trip. Someone will pay 20x more for immediate servicing of their need. Worse yet, if someone is in a super difficult situation, injured in the mountains and needs a helicopter ambulance, they'll be looking at a bill of $20,000 or more!

This made me realize, wholesalers are the ambulances of real estate. Not everyone can wait days to see their doctor (i.e. use a realtor). Many times people need help right now and the value in that is immense. We provide a very specific service to sellers and depending on the level of service they need, we can get paid well for that. 

I run a virtual team, meaning everyone lives in different places around the country. We have a call recording system and access to everyone’s email but I’m curious what other remote business owners are doing to kee their employees accountable?

Secondly, being a remote commission based employee can be very tough. How do you keep your employees engaged and excited about working for a company where they only see their colleagues a few times a year?

@Duane Alexander

Another great thing to do is get on PropStream and pull cash buyers from last six months or a year within a mile radius of what house you’re looking to wholesale. Skip trace that list through lead Sherpa (they can do LLCs) and then hand dial it. Shouldn’t be more than 20-30 at most. Sometimes it’s only 5 when you do this.

Stephen, are you hand dialing a list? how many calls are you putting in? That seems pretty time consuming!

Also to all the other people on here, I understand that some people see cold calling as a nuisance and maybe even unethical but I'd challenge that by citing the clients I've worked with who cry out of happiness when we help get rid of their real estate problem. People who for one reason or another are not able to be contacted through direct mail, who don't use FB and who rarely use the internet. There are still people out there who need help that aren't searching on google and can only be reached through cold calling. I want to find those people and help them out. 

I’ve been cold calling for years and it was a main piece of my company’s marketing plan. We usually saw a contact rate of 10-12% using the Mojo dialer and it produced a deal every month or so, sometimes multiple deals per month.

As of recent, we’ve seen a drop down to 2-3% contact rates using the same data source and the same cold caller. It’s definitely not a personnel issue from looking into the problem.

I did some research online and it seems that new legislation allows and somewhat requires phone companies to actively block phone numbers that it suspects of being SPAM which could be any number that calls the same phone number 3 or more times.

I have used XenCall in the past but their customer service was terrible so we decided to stop using them and go back to Mojo Dialer but I’m thinking that was a mistake...

Any input would be greatly appreciated!

For some context, I do wholesaling in Indianapolis so there are a lot of deep discount deals out there, we’re just struggling to get in touch with these people now.

🙏🏻

The leap from hobby to professional is a scary one, especially if you have an existing job that pays well. That was the case for me as I began my virtual wholesaling business and eventually quit my $150k+ job to go full time.

This post is for those people that have been wholesaling a couple deals a month and are on the edge of committing to full time. “Burning the boats” or cutting off the consistent paycheck was F-ing scary! But in the end SO worth it.

WHEN I MADE THE LEAP: I had about $30k saved from deals I had done over the past couple years. I had one employee in place that was doing acquisitions for me at $15/hr plus 7% commission on all deals. I lived in CA so I was JVing everything with my boots on the ground that was also splitting marketing costs with me.

When I started seriously considering quitting my comfy corporate job, one of my buddies, who has been an entrepreneur his whole life, asked me “worst case scenario, if you quit, could you get your old job back or get a similar job relatively quickly?” I was 50% confident that I could. So he said “well then you really have nothing to lose. Worst case scenario you give your true desires a shot and end up where you are currently.” That was the deciding moment. I quit the next day.

HOW IT LOOKED: At the moment I'm writing this, I have a team of 5 and don't JV anything anymore but it wasn't always that way. After quitting my corporate job, I continued virtual wholesaling and splitting all my deals 50/50 with my JV partner. The problem was that we were both visionaries (read TRACTION by Gino Wickman) and if you have two dreamers without a highly organized Integrator, it just causes chaos. We made it work but it was extremely stressful. Because neither of us were detail oriented, the little things fell through the cracks which led to finger pointing and resentment.

After six more months of that, I made the decision to break it off with him which was tough because he had become like a brother to me. In my mind breaking off this relationship could ruin my business but it did the exact opposite....

Now that I didn’t have a boots on the ground to sell deals to our investors in Indianapolis (remember I was living in California), I had to use my property inspector/photographer to show properties to investors and I did all the dispositions work myself from afar. I paid my photographer to go to showings, $50 for each one, and he simply acted as a barrier between the investor and seller at showings.

Obviously this was not even remotely scaleable so I had to hire someone ASAP to do dispositions. I posted on ZipRecruiter and set up an interview with a promising candidate. Since we still had no dispositions agent, I flew to Indianapolis in the interim to act as boots on the ground until we hired the right person.

While I was there, I was struggling to keep everything on track. I was needing to manage and coach my acquisitions agent, interview/train candidates for dispositions and still manage all of the administrative stuff to keep the business running i.e. payroll, ordering marketing, tracking KPIs, paying bills etc.

My sister called me who has been HYPER organized since she was a kid. I had shared Rich Dad Poor Dad with her a month before and she was stoked. “I get it” she said “and I’m ready to take the leap. I wanna come work with you.”

This was a golden opportunity but because we had struggled over the last few months since I had left my JV partner, I only had about $25k left in the bank AND I was about to hire a dispositions agent. Not good "timing" but I knew my current business model was unsustainable unless I added the RIGHT PEOPLE in the RIGHT SEATS.

I bit the bullet and hired my sister to be our integrator and hired an older guy with 40 years real estate experience as my dispositions manager.

Now that we had the right pieces in place we were ready to pour gas on the fire. I hadn’t REALLY dove into my marketing KPIs so my sister and I did that first. We found what mail was working and what wasn’t and planned out the next few mailings.

Next we read and implemented TRACTION from top to bottom. I can not emphasize this enough. TRACTION WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE AND YOUR BUSINESS FOR THE BETTER. It truly helped us get a grip on all aspects of our business including our 1) Vision 2) Data 3) People 4) Process 5) Traction 6) and Issues. I could write a novel about how much this helped but for now I’ll say, if you have a business with anyone else involved you must read and implement Traction and the EOS model.

WHERE WE ENDED UP: Since we got everyone in place correctly, we went from 10-20k a month to $50k/mo consistently and we’re set to do $70k a month in 2021. We still have a lot of room to grow but the biggest moments along the way involved taking a calculated risk, a leap of faith and ultimately putting my money where my mouth is and hiring great people at the right price.

I hope you make the tough choice and follow your dream instead of playing it safe. It’s more fun on the other side, trust me :)

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@Christopher Owens

Hey Chris, the Midwest is kinda known for cash flow. I'd look in places like Louisville, Memphis, Indianapolis, Columbus etc. smaller spreads dollar wise but your ROI will be way higher in these market. For example, you could get a duplex from a wholesaler in Indy for around $80k that grosses $1,400/mo in rent. We had one of those come across recently.

I can’t speak to higher priced markets but the Midwest is def known for cash flow. Good luck! 💪🏻