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Let’s say you are interested in getting started wholesaling properties but not sure what the state laws are concerning this kind of real estate transactions and you don’t want to break any laws unknowingly.

Although every state is different, I assure you that wholesaling is legal everywhere. This is just business like any other and the free market system – buying low and selling high – nothing illegal about that.

Also if you are not a realtor, you don’t have to worry about many things because you are not considered a professional. Even though some realtors don’t know Jack: I have some friends who have taken Realtor test – in several different sates – and passed without studying. In most states you only have to score a 70 to pass the exam and get your license. When I was in school that was a D grade. So much for them being professional.

Anyway, here is my philosophy about the legal aspect. Do what is right and be brutally honest in everything you do – and you have nothing to worry about. If you are still concerned about the legality, talk to a real estate closing attorney (or a real estate specific attorney) and they can direct you.

Again, the only people that are or should be worried about legalities are people who are trying to cheat people, in my opinion. As long as the purchase is an “As Is” purchase, you are fine. A buyer will not be able to come back on you. Don’t be dishonest about anything and don’t try to trick anybody in any kind of way. So do right, tell the truth, and you should have nothing to worry about.

I talk to many investors who started in Real Estate with the goal of buying and selling houses, but they ended up being landlords – and they hated it. I personally love rental houses and own a lot of them, but these sad stories led me nevertheless to focus on finding buyers.

This same experience happened to me where I ended up having to get a loan to buy a house I put under contract and was not able to sell.

Fortunately, I had a mentor who told me to forget everything I have learned about real estate and who taught me a new way of investing – finding out what investors wanted and not what I thought they should have.

Real Estate investing, if you do it full time, is not a simple fun hobby that you do on the side like you see on TV where people flip houses and make a bunch of money. Yes, it can be done, but in my opinion the TV shows are dramatized crap that does more harm than good. They make people think one can get a junker property, invest a lot of money in it, and sell it really fast making a killing.

Wake up and get real! Most of the time it does not work like that in the real world, and you will find it out really fast. Really know what is going to sell before you put time and money in the deal.

For that you will have to find the buyers and ask them what they want. It can be an easy process if you set up a system that does it automatically. Learn the secret that most the gurus don’t tell you – how to find out what will sell before you buy.

Unfortunately, most of the time you cannot use assignments on foreclosures. In case of REOs, most banks will have it in their contract that it is not assignable.

I had the same problem on a foreclosure I put under contract. The buyer wanted me to assign the contract to him and I nearly lost the deal. Eventually he decided to go ahead and buy the property from me even though I could not assign it to him and let him close on my contract.

I actually have done a few assignments on foreclosures, so it is not completely impossible – but very unlikely. Just ask, and every now and then you will deal with a bank rep who doesn’t care, but Extremely Rarely! I would go ahead thinking that you will not be able to assign the contract.

One way to go when buying REO’s is to put REO’s under contract in an LLC then sell the LLC to an end buyer to avoid the non-assignment clause. It takes a little work but it can be an excellent strategy.

Another way to go if assigning the contract is out of the question is to find an attorney that will do a double closing. You can also have a hard money lender set up so that you would be able to fund the deal for the flip. I do this all the time now. I have a lot of guys who will lend me hard money, even though I hate paying the price for borrowing. Sometimes it is a grand just to borrow the money for an hour, but if I can pay 1k to make 5-10k or higher I will do that all day long.

When you are sure the house will sell fast, do what I do and put your earnest money down. Get thirty days to close (I have never had a problem with that except in rare cases where they offered me a super deal if I would close sooner) and start marketing it. The bottom line is if you think you have buyers for the property, don’t let anything stop you from making an offer.

Bird dogging and beginning wholesaling are not the same, although there are a lot of similarities between them. The control over who has the buyers is the largest difference.

To explain it simply, a bird dog basically finds houses (or, sometimes, buyers) for an investor who buys and then sells or keeps the house. It is like finding a deal and assigning it to another buyer – what beginning wholesalers do a lot. But usually the bird dog is not making nearly as much money as the wholesaler.

I also started with bird dogging houses for investors. It allowed me to become really good at one part of the business – finding deals – but I had no idea how to sell properties. Knowing how to find buyers is where the wholesaling begins. A wholesaler is good at all aspects of the business: finding deals and finding buyers.

When I was bird dogging I was making great money (I thought). I was making 500 to 1000 bucks a house and I was finding 5-10 deals a month for the other investors. When I decided to go at it alone and find my own buyers, my income increased dramatically – I was then getting 3-5k on every deal doing the same amount of deals as before.

Once I got to wholesaling houses strong, I am using hard money and I close on all my contracts, only occasionally assigning a contract. As your business grows and you become a true wholesaler, you really begin to see how different it is from bird dogging.

With all apparent similarities, once you take a closer look you see that the main difference is control. I don’t depend on anybody but myself, I have a group of buyers I sell to on a monthly basis, and I have people that bird dog for me. I may pay them 500 or 1000 for their work while I make up to 5k just seeing through the deal they found. You see the difference?

Bird dogging is the way to start. You may never want to go further than that, but if you are planning on being full time and being able to do it when the market is up or when the market is down, you need to push to become a wholesaler as fast as you can.

If someone dropped me in a new town and told me to buy a good real estate deal in less than 3 hours, here is what I would do.

Unlike all the big experts who will tell you to do a lot of marketing and make lots of offers on houses, if I wanted to find a deal fast the first thing I would do is find the local wholesaler.

Not just any wholesaler, because in a large market there will probably be more than a few and that is where you want to invest. What you should look for is the Big dog wholesaler, the one who is moving more properties than anyone else. Look for somebody who is purchasing and selling 5 to 10 properties per month. That would be a true wholesaler.

A true wholesaler marks up a deal a few thousand and goes to the next deal, nothing like many courses and real estate gurus talking of making 10, 20 or even 50k on a deal. These are not true wholesalers, they are flippers.

Flippers make home runs. They find a property and mark it up a bunch and make a killing one deal. These will be the guys that do one or two deals a month.

The true wholesalers will only make a little on each deal and therefore will have investors buying from them over and over again because they know they are getting the best deals.

In short, devoting a lot of time and money trying to learn how to find real estate deals in my opinion is a waste of time. I am one of the big dog wholesalers in my area and, after thinking about how I do business, I realized that before I became a wholesaler I wasted lots of time and money learning how to find deals. It does pay off if you want to be a wholesaler but if you are just trying to flip a deal or build a rental portfolio it really does not make sense trying to find better deals than me because you will not be able to do it.

If you want to find great deals super fast then use the local wholesaler. It is like having a buyer on your staff that is doing all the legwork for you. The time and money that is saved by using their expertise is more than worth the mark up you will pay.

Where do you go to buy something at lower a price? Wal-Mart, Target, all of the similar stores are large wholesalers. They buy in bulk and then pass the savings on to the consumer. In your real estate investing the local wholesaler does the same for you.

If you looked for an investment club in your area and could not find one, I have to say I don’t think you were looking hard enough.

Recently somebody told me that they couldn’t find any investment clubs in Charleston, South Carolina. So I ran a search on Google and got several results. On the list of contacts there were two clubs in Charleston, some links to Web sites with several phone numbers. If I tried to call so many numbers, I would certainly find someone who would point me the right direction.

By the way, I went to high school in Dillon, SC, so I know about Charleston. I will bet you any amount of money that there is an investment club or association there; in the city the size of Charleston there is inevitably at least one.

Always start with using Internet; you will find out that a problem you are facing is simple. What if you are not comfortable around computers? Learn how to use one, especially the Internet; not doing it nowadays is quite a disadvantage. What you really need is to get enthusiastic and more determined to find the answers you need.

What helped me develop the attitude of determination, was telling myself that finding the answers and achieving my goals was the matter of life and death. When you can learn to imagine yourself in this kind of situation, you will be able to do anything. It is hard to imagine, of course, that someone is holding a gun to your head and gave you a time limit to come up with a solution of a problem. But look at the mental side of things – don’t you think that this method of self-motivation could be quite effective?

My advice to you is – be proactive! Start with the Web, get any related information, write down all available numbers and call them. Even if you don’t find exactly what you are looking for, you would still make useful contacts in the area and eventually find what you were looking for.