I suppose the trick was to find out what he wanted, then spin the deal to meet his needs as well as my own

Here is one more trick - buy a property late in the year to offset the profits you have made earlier in the year.

You might be pleasantly surprised to find more interesting tricks as you learn more about real estate investing and multifamily. 

I added wholesaling to my bag of tricks because we were finding alot of great deals for ourselves but couldn't take on too much at once.

Keep in mind though the other trick is that the property has to be in decent condition to use an FHA, I don't believe you can use it on a fixer upper. 

One trick is I don't see a lot of what I would think are good rental type properties close to the highway. 

Just going to give this a bump.Not earning more money, but a trick that I just heard that I loved was since I get paid every 2 weeks, there are two months that I get paid 3 times. 

In the crawl space, maybe right before the cables go through the outside wall, coil up a couple of feet of extra cable - this lets you do tricks later like cutting off the last inch of cable and installing a new connector.

They WILL try every last stupid trick in the book to get one over on you, pay late, get something for nothing.  

And, by that, I mean that you need to get it under contract with some sort of purchase contract - maybe with some sort of contingency to get out of the contract should you not be able to find a buyer.I guess thats the trick to wholesaling.