How to Find Wholesalers and Contractors
As a real estate investor, your bread and butter is finding properties below market value, renovating them, and then gaining a return on your initial investment by either reselling the property for a profit or renting it out as a continual source of income. We’ve written extensively on flipping properties in quick sales and renting them out, and quite a good bit on renovation processes as well. This week, however, we’d like to focus on the earlier steps in the process, namely, how to find the necessary market players for even getting them done: wholesalers and contractors.
Real estate wholesalers specialize in moving properties they don’t actually own for prices below market value. As an investor looking to buy, renovate, and sell (or rent) one to a few properties at a time, a wholesaler is a good person to know. When you as rehabber work with wholesalers, you don’t have to do any marketing to find deals. Marketing is a time-consuming process; if you go through a wholesaler, the deals are already found, negotiated, and tied up, and that’s exactly what wholesalers specialize in. There’s an enormous value in having someone else do all this work for you. The volume available to wholesalers also holds a considerable value to you as an investor. Even one or two wholesalers can provide you with enough deals to keep you extremely busy. It’s all about leveraging your efforts by working with others, which brings us to the best way to find them: networking.
Networking could take many forms, and the simplest one is to sign up for a subscription to a wholesaler’s inventory list. These lists may require you to pay a yearly subscription fee, but if you’re serious about actually buying and moving properties, it’s well worth the investment. Be sure to check out reviews or ask other rehabbers what their experiences are with various wholesalers. Client satisfaction and reputations go a long way and are hard to fake. Other forms of networking include getting to know those who work in your local real estate market. This doesn’t just apply to wholesalers (more on that in a minute), but you don’t always need to see every market player as direct competition; as we’re about to discuss, many can be partners and means to mutually beneficial ends.
Finding reliable, quality contractors are another necessary step in the process of turning an investment into a profit. For one, you need contractors who will do good work for a reasonable fee. You don’t want to hire amateurs in the interest of saving a quick buck, but you also don’t want to overpay to the extent that you cut into your own profits. Contractors tend to prize their reputations, so much like wholesalers, you’ll likely find no shortage of former clients and jobs you can inspect by a professional contractor. Again, being active in your local market is the best way to go about this. The best reviews aren’t found online but rather over a cup of coffee with another rehabber or after a few business card exchanges at a mixer or conference. If you have some contemporaries in the market that you respect, whenever they say, “I know a guy,” it’s at least worth hearing them out and doing your homework on the suggested contact.
Always do your due diligence in ascertaining the practicality of any partnership or professional relationship, of course, but that’s not to say you can’t reach out and explore the landscape to see what’s out there. After all, you can’t exactly open doors of opportunity if you don’t actually walk up to them and grab the handle. Don’t be afraid to check out online databases or review sites, even if you weren’t sent there to check out a specific contact.
For example, industry- specific database websites such as this one are revolutionizing local real estate markets by putting professionals in touch who stand to mutually benefit from one another’s businesses, services, and respective specializations. In this instance and others like it, it’s not a paid subscription but rather a free community database through which industry professionals can find one another without the hassle of broader search engines or phone books. Email lists and corresponding social media groups also help bring professionals together to trade tips, exchange contacts, and share advice.
Speaking of social media, in this day and age we all know that it’s indispensable for marketing when it comes to various professions that involve real estate. The same is true for actually marketing yourself as an investor and finding partners to work with. Like more traditional forms of networking, sending a colleague the way of a contractor who did good work for you in the past or connecting a contemporary with a trustworthy wholesaler is likely to pay dividends in the long run. As with most forms of networking, it’s all about relationships and leveraging your reputation in the market to better conduct your business. As the market benefits from interconnectedness and healthy, fair competition, so do the participating players. A rising tide, after all, lifts all boats.
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– Get It Right Solutions