I told him I was closing on a deal that week and getting a payday. 

That's my opinion at least after looking at some of the sale prices at the auction...the higher value properties get the margin squeezed too thin by someone willing to rehab it for a $30K payday.

Wholesaling, retail real estate and building/remodels take all of my time (plus some), and the absolute dollar margins on flips here isn't worth the hassle to me for a 6 month wait on a payday given the other choices I have to spend time on.In this market (Ohio), doing $5 million in annual sales gets you top 3% of producing agents and teams

I'd rather wait to find the right deal that is going to make for a nice payday then pick up a bunch of properties that will each make a smaller return. 

And taking into account lessons learned on this one, you'd probably have a pretty nice payday.

I am in a community of awesome folks who believe that "to pay it forward" returns the biggest payday no matter what avenues of REI!  

With income taxes over half of Americans see them as a pay day.

Otherwise the data can be top notch, but if you cant covert the data to leads to contracts to assignments to a payday, then it's useless.

Much less time and money invested, much less effort put out and a much smaller payday because of it.People that are good bird dogs are people like mail carriers since they know who is not picking up their mail and might have an abandoned property, bus drivers especially school bus drivers that will go through residential neighborhoods and can see distressed properties all day, people that work in nursing homes (pre-probate list...), firefighters to see places with lots of superficial fire damage, the super chatty soccer mom that is in everyones business and can tell you anything about anyone in their neighborhood, etc.

But I would pay it off in 6 months.."...Liz, if you're that confident, why not just put every unspent dollar before each pay day into your current (2.5% lower interest rate) mortgage?