Opportunity to Wholesale

In this post, I’d like to share a recent experience that I went through. I am currently looking for a house to buy in the area around my college. I have been looking on market and have also done a lot of work to find homes that are off market. One technique that I have used is contacting properties listed for rent. One of these owners got back and in this post I want to share what happened.

This property was a 4 Plex with 2 of the units listed for rent on Zillow. The property was listed with a property management group so I did some work and found out who the owner of the property was. The property owner was an out of state investor and had purchased the building in 2022.

I contacted him directly asking if he was willing to sell the property. To my surprise, he was willing to sell the property and asked what I could offer. I have learned to try and never give the first price without knowing more about the property, so I asked if the building needed any repairs and what he thought it would be worth in today’s market.

He told me that he had done some renovations totally up to around $30,000 in order to improve reliability. He then went on to say that he would consider selling it at $415,000. This immediately became out of my price range to purchase myself so I then considered working to wholesale this deal. I asked what the current units were listed for rent for and if he would consider doing a subject to deal as this is very appealing to buyers today. He told me the information and said he would do a subject to.

At this point, I recognized that $415,000 was too high for me and I needed to work him down. This price would have been slightly above market value for a fully rented, renovated multifamily and I did not think there would be many people wanting a wholesale deal at this price. I felt that if I could get him down to the $390,000 to $405,000 range there was some room to make the deal work.

Unfortunately, he was very set on his price and was not willing to go much off of his starting number. I believe part of the reason for this was due to the fact that he had not owned the property for that long. I was not giving him a price that was really worth his while at the time and I understand that. This was a really good learning experience that gave me practice in both negotiation and analysis from a wholesalers perspective.

I encourage anyone reading this to step out of their comfort zone and try something similar. You never know, it might just give you your next deal!