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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.

In my area one will find quite a few investors who make a lot of money, but if you ask them what their secret is to finding their properties they will tell you that they don’t know how.

What these investors will tell you is they let the local wholesaler find them. There are several investors in my area that buy from me (I am the wholesaler) over and over again. Sometimes I think I am missing out when I hear about all the money they are making on the deals that I sell them; but that is just the way it is.

These successful investors decided that I didn’t feel comfortable selling properties to home owners, and they figured out that I had no desire to make a huge profit on a deal. I just wanted to make a few thousand and do that a bunch of times every month.

Most of these investors realized that I had to move properties fast so I could make a living. Unlike them, buying and selling houses is my full time job. They already have jobs, so they would not find the time to look for the deals that I brought to them.

In short, if you want to make a lot of money in real estate yet you don’t have the time to find the deals, buy from the guy who is selling 5-10 properties a month and doing volume business. If you don’t, you will soon find out that the most you will save is a few thousand bucks, and the time it will take you to do so will not be worth it.