If you want to start Wholesaling Real Estate in 21 Days or Less without spending $1 in marketing and without having to have tons of experience, hey everyone. My name is Alex Martinez. I'm the CEO and Founder of realestateskills.com. We help everyday people to wholesale, flip houses across the nation. This strategy alone I'm about to cover today, it helped us generate over 12 million in revenue, our first year in the game in real estate. First off, what I'll cover today is what is wholesaling real estate exactly. I'll cover the wholesaling process at a high level so you understand. Then number three, I'll cover this 12-step process on how you can start wholesaling real estate in 21 days or less in your area. First off let's cover what is wholesaling real estate exactly? But what wholesaling is, is when you get a property under contract at one specific price, let's say $100,000. Initially you are the buyer on the deal. You put the property under contract at $100,000, but then you find a cash buyer, typically a fix and flipper that wants to buy this deal at a higher price. Let's say they want to buy it at $110,000. Now, all you need to do is put that property under contract at one price, and then sell the contract to your cash buyer at a higher price. If they want it at 110,000, you make the $10,000 difference as a profit. It's very simple. There's two main ways to close a wholesale deal. It's through assigning the contract. Let's say you have a property under contract to buy. You can assign those contract rights, which is essentially just a transfer of contract rights from one party to another party. All right. This is a pretty simplistic approach. We do this for about 99% of our wholesale deals. We always love assigning, because it's so simple. The second way to close these deals are through double closing. Double closing, essentially, what it means is you close on that property with some funds, typically funds from a transactional lender, someone who's willing to lend funds for 24 hours or up to 72 hours on this deal. In that example, the $100,000 deal, let's say you brought the funds to buy it for $100,000, but then you lined up the second buyer. You lined up your cash buyer to buy it $110,000. There's actually two closes that happen. It can happen within the same escrow company, sometimes two different escrow companies. But what's going to happen is you close on the deal at 100,000 and then gets resold to your cash buyer at 110,000. There's going to be some fees, some closing costs. You're not going to make completely $10,000 when you double close, but you will still make a nice profit. That's why I recommend assigning the contract versus double closing, because there are more steps involved. Today, in this process, to make it as simple as possible, we're just going to cover assigning the contract to your cash buyer so you can wholesale it. Let's cover the wholesaling process at a high level. All right. Essentially we want to do is, number one, find a house that is in a distressed condition, meaning it's outdated, it's stuck in the '70s. The grass is overgrown. There's mold. It smells like cat pee. Basically a house where a first time home buyer can't move in and get a first time home buyer loan or a conventional mortgage. It's a house that is distressed so that it needs to go all cash. Now what you're also going to be looking for is a house that has a seller who's in a distress situation. Maybe they're facing a foreclosure. They're not able to make their mortgage payments. Maybe they're going through a divorce and they have a lot of memories in the house and they wanted to sell the house quickly. Maybe there was a death in the family and they got inherited a property. They don't know what to do with it. They just want to get rid of it. They don't want to deal with it. When we can find a property that's in a distress condition and the seller's in a distress situation, I like to call that a double whammy. There's a lot of motivation for that deal. There's a lot of motivation for that deal to go below market value. Those are the types of deals we're looking for. I'm going to show you today exactly how you can find those deals in your area across the United States. The second thing we need to do is once you find that deal, you need to get that property under contract. You need to get under contract, hopefully below market value. That allows you to mark that price up to a cash buyer so that you can wholesale it and make a nice profit and your cash buyer can make a profit from reving property as well. Once we get under contract, you sell those rights to your fix and flipper, and then you close the deal. What we see across the nation from doing hundreds of deals over the last decade is that the average wholesale fee is about $10,000. I want you to shoot for that. Some deals you will make more than $10,000. Some deals you will make less. It's totally fine. Just to know, it will average out typically around $10,000. Now let's get into the 12-step process so you can start wholesaling real estate in 21 days or less. Step number one, what you want to do is pick your market. All right. You want to pick your market. The market, you plan on wholesaling it. I got some chicken scratch. I was a C student in English, but got an A in real estate. As long as you can read that, we're good to go. You want to pick the real estate market, you plan on wholesaling again. I get asked all the time, "Alex, should I start virtually wholesaling in estate, five states over? Or should I start wholesaling locally where I live?" What I recommend 9 times out of 10 for someone is just start local, start in your city, start in your county where you're located, because it's going to be a hundred times easier to wholesale a house there than if you just pick a random state to start wholesaling in because you heard someone else's wholesaling there. There are deals in every single market across the United States and there's deals right there in your own backyard. It's what I want you to understand. Pick your market. This takes about one minute. If you want a wholesale virtually, you absolutely can. What I do recommend is that you have some affinity to a market. Maybe you lived there for five years beforehand, maybe you know real estate agents and investors there already, maybe you bought a house in that particular market. Then sure, you can start virtually at wholesaling. But know that if you start local, you're going to be able to attend local Real Estate Investors' Association Meetings. You're going to be able to meet face-to-face with cash buyers. You're going to be able to meet face-to-face with real estate agents and sellers at property. There's so many benefits to starting local and you know more than you think you know about your market. You probably know up and coming neighborhoods. You probably know the bad areas. You probably know the prices to some degree, good zip codes, bad zip codes, and all that local knowledge will help you be a better wholesaler and help you to wholesale houses faster. Number one, pick your market. Is it local? Is it virtual? I recommend local. Then let's go to step number two. Step number two is find three to five cash buyers. Okay. You want to find three to five quality cash buyers in your market that are actually buying deals. Typically, these cash buyers are going to be fix and flippers. We like working with fix and flippers who will buy your wholesale deals for all cash and cash buyers that are buying multiple houses per month. This way you don't deal with a cash buyer who says, "Hey, I buy a house every 6 months or 12 months." They're not going to be fast to respond to your wholesale deals. They're not going to be the ones willing to pay you top dollar for deals. We want the cash buyers that are hungry, buying multiple deals every single month in your area. That way you can confidently wholesale 3, 5, 10 houses every single month. That's not a roadblock. It's not a hindrance for you at all. One of my last videos, I created a training on how to find cash buyers online for free. I'll put a link here and in the description. You can check that out. I'll teach you exactly how to find these cash buyers for your wholesale deals in your market. Now let's go to step three. All right. Step three is finding and filtering for deals. Okay. Now remember what I mentioned. What types of deals are we looking for? We're looking for houses that are in a distressed condition and a seller who's in a distressed situation. We want to find and filter for these deals. What I always recommend for anyone is to utilize the MLS. The MLS is the Multiple Listing Service. It's a database of all the houses on the market, in your area, and it's created and maintained by real estate professionals. According to the National Association of Realtors, about 90% of all real estate transactions that occur every single year happen on the MLS, on market. These are on market deals. All right. That means 10% of the rest of the transactions happen off market. If you want to have the best success and wholesale of house, as soon as possible and consistently do it and predictably do it, I recommend the MLS because there's always new houses coming on the market every single day that are distressed. Now, majority of houses that will be on the market, they're going to be retail and move and ready for first time home buyer. But guess what? They're still distress, property and distress condition with a seller and distress situation being uploaded to the MLS in your area every single day. The best part is you don't have to spend any money in marketing. You don't have to send any letters for direct mail. You don't have to put out any banded signs. You don't have to make any cold calls to be able to find and get these deals on the MLS. To get access to the MLS, most states have something called Assistant Access to where if you're on license, you can work with an Investor-Friendly agent and get access to the MLS. If you are licensed already, then you can get access to the MLS in your market. But let's say you don't know an Investor-Friendly agent and you want to get started today, what's the next best thing you can do to find and filter for these deals on the market? Well, the next best thing, instead of the MLS, you can use redfin.com, put that down, redfin.com, Zillow or realtor.com in your area. Okay. These will pull listings. These will pull houses for sale from the MLS and put it onto these websites. It's not exactly the same thing. There's always going to be more deals, more history, more data on the MLS. We like to refer to the MLS as the king database. It's something as a serious real estate investor, as a serious wholesaler, you're definitely going to want access to sooner or later. The sooner you do it, the better your business is going to be. But once again, if you want to start a wholesaling in 21 days or less, you can hop on redfin.com, Zillow and Realtor, and look at the houses for sale in your market today. All right. I'll give you two strategies, two really good strategies we've been using for 10 years to be able to find these deals consistently. Number one is going to be the day zero strategy. I'll explain that and then old listings. All right. One, two. What's the day zero strategy? What are we doing here? We're trying to find houses that have just been put on the market date on ... the first day, within 24 hours. That's why it's not the day one strategy. It's the day zero strategy. With that day zero strategy, what you want to do is find and filter all the new deals that were listed on the market. Let's say there's 50 new houses that would put on the market today in your county. What you want to do is filter through those deals, which houses are in a distress condition that looks like, "Oh man, this needs to go all cash. It's stuck in the '60s, the '70s. It's completely outdated. There's mold. There's water damage." Those are the houses that we're looking for. Also, if you use the MLS, there's going to be more information about the property. Typically, there's remarks that are confidential for anyone who has access to the MLS. Sometimes it tells you the seller's motivation and why they're selling. All right. Now in Redfin and Zillow, it will have some descriptions as well the property, even realtor, too, and what's going on? It might have the seller's motivation, but a lot of the time it does not. If you just use any of these platforms to find deals on a daily basis, using the day zero strategy, you find 50 new properties, maybe 5 to 10 of those are distressed. Those are the deals that you're going to want to focus on a daily basis. All right. You just do that alone. You're going to be able to wholesale multiple houses and find these houses and put them under contract every single month. The day zero strategy works really well, because if a distressed house gets put on the market immediately today, and it's going to go to an investor, it's going to go to a wholesaler, it's going to go to a fix and flipper. It's going to go to someone who's bringing all cash. Why not you? All right. If it's going to go to an investor, who's going to pay all cash for this property? Typically, it's going to go to the investor, who's going to build the most report with the agent. Okay. Speed's the name of the game with the day zero strategy. As soon as that property is listed on the market, you want to call that agent so that you can tell them who you are, what your company is about and learn about this property and build rapport. We'll get into that in the next step, but also want to tell you about the old listing strategy. With the old listing strategy, if you look at property now on one of these platforms and you see the property's been active on the market for 60 days plus or 90 days plus, we know that in today's market, there is something wrong with that property. There might have been litigation, some legal issues, something, a reason why that house didn't sell that house could have been listed at way too high of a price. Now the seller's willing to come down in price. There's a lot of reasons. If you call in those old listings that are definitely wholesale worthy, there's going to be a problem. When you talk to the real estate agent, you're going to want to understand why hasn't this property sold for 63 days or 94 days. What's been going on with it, just so I understand? Sometimes they can bring you a problem. If you can solve that problem for that agent, for that seller, guess what? You can be the knight in shining armor and close that deal and get under contract. There's other strategies we cover. But just those two alone, you'll be able to wholesale your first house in 21 days or less using those strategies. All right. Now on a daily basis, when we find these types of deals using these platforms, step four is to make discovery calls daily. Okay. Make discovery calls daily to real estate agents. All right. What you want to do is once, again, if you find 50 new listings that came on the market and maybe 5 to 10 of them are distressed, if you use the MLS, you're going to have the contact information of the real estate agent that's selling that house on the market. On the strategy, we do not target the homeowner directly. The homeowner who put their house on the market has hired a real estate agent called a seller's agent or listing agent that's willing to sell the house on the market for the seller. We contact that listing agent directly. If you use the MLS, what's great about it, it will have the phone number, the email for that particular agent so you can call them directly. If you use Redfin or Zillow or Realtor, sometimes it doesn't have all that information. It may have their name, the listing agent's name, but then you just want to Google that listing agent's name and then find their phone number and their email. The very least just find their phone number and then give them a call about this particular deal. We call the agents daily. One, we want to get a pulse on the deal. Number two, we want to build rapport with the agents. We want to be professional, and we want to make sure that we build credibility and authority. When you call these agents, you're not just a wholesaler. This is what I teach all my clients. I recommend for anyone who wants the wholesaler real estate, don't look at yourself as just a wholesaler. If you want to be just a wholesaler, that's really fine. But I encourage you to be a real estate investor. Someone who not only wholesale, but fixes and flips property, buys and holds property and builds wealth through running out the property to other people. If you see yourself as that, then project yourself as that. When you call an agent, you're not just a wholesaler, you're a buyer, you're an investor. That's what agents want to work with. Agents want to work with decision makers. If you make yourself a decision maker on these deals, they're going to want to work with you. All right. This is a big tip. I see so many amateurs call agents say, "Hey, I'm a wholesaler." Agents don't like that word. Then they say, "Hey, go kick rocks." They're crying. They're wondering why the heck they never get deals. It's because what you say is very important, what you say and how you say it, all right. On this call, we're building rapport and you're checking in on the deal you're calling on, that lead. Do the photos. Match up with the current condition of the property. You can ask the agent. Is there anything out of the ordinary about this property that needs renovation? Does it need a new roof? Does it have any crack slabs? These are significant repairs that you'll need to add to your repair budget when we get to that particular point in time. Then also you can ask this agent questions like, how's activity been on the property? Are there a lot of offers on this property by any chance? Now you can get a pulse on your competition. They may say, "Hey, we got three offers, but they're all below this price at 150." We've had agents tell us that. You want to ask information about the deal, about the competition, who's in the running. You could have agents say, "Hey, you're the first one to call. I like what I'm hearing. I definitely want to work with the cash investor on this deal. How about you come meet me at the property at 2:00 p.m. and we make this deal happen?" That can happen, too. That's where with day zero, the day zero strategy speeds part of the name of the game. Once again, call agents daily. Talk to them about these deals. We're only calling on distress deals. You're not calling on beautiful brand new renovated property. That's not going to go all cash. That's not going to go to a wholesaler. You're calling on distressed property. Be sure to do this, because once again, a lot of amateurs think every single property they can wholesale. That's absolutely not the case. Once we call the agent, we're verifying the condition of the property. We're understanding more about the property. Has it been updated or is it in its current state? Do the photos match with the current condition? Are those photos old on the MLS or on the market? Now, when we end this conversation, you don't have to close the agent. You don't have to give this agent an offer price. It's very important you understand that. Because a lot of people get really nervous and think they got to throw out an offer and they pull something out willy-nilly that doesn't even make sense, that they're going to have to backtrack on eventually. Just know, you can leave every conversation, every discovery call you have with an agent, you can say, "Hey Vanessa," the agent name is Vanessa. "Hey, Vanessa, I really enjoyed talking with you. Thank you for sharing so much information about this deal. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get back with my team. We're going to evaluate this property with all the information we have now. I'm going to be able to get back to you within a few hours and give you a no nonsense, genuine cash offer that we can stick to. Does that sound good?" I've never had anyone tell me "No." They're going to say, "Yes. That sounds good." Now what you can do is once you end that conversation and you understand, great, I got a hot lead on my hands. I understand everything about this deal. I see the photos. They match up with the current condition of the property. I know my competition. Now what we can do is go to the next step. All right. We can further analyze the property. The numbers we're going to get here are the ARV, the repairs costs, your wholesale fee, and our offer price, also known as the purchase price. All right. Some people may be saying, "Well, Alex, don't I want to analyze every single deal before I call a real estate agent?" You can. But it's not recommended. Because what's going to happen is you're going to take an hour, two hours, three hours analyzing a property. That's hot. That's on the market. That's going to go do a wholesaler. If you spend that time, two hours analyzing it, then 6:00 p.m. Then you don't call that agent that day. You wait till the next day to call them. Guess what? Myself, my students, my clients, we've all called that agent immediately and been able to get that deal under contract. We call the agent first to verify is this house even on the market's deal? We call this agent to build rapport with that agent. Because if you just think that a text message or an email will be sufficient in building rapport with an agent, getting your offer accepted, you'll be sadly mistaken. People work with who they trust and like. It's so important that we call the real estate agents first. We want to do that once again so that we can further analyze the property. The agent might tell you information about this deal that directly affects the repair costs that you'll be analyzing for, that you would've just had to assume about before actually having a 15-minute phone conversation with that agent. We analyze the property after we talk to the agent and they're open to working with us on the deal and everything sounds good. This property's distressed and it's going to go to a cash buyer. With analyzing the property, the first thing we want to do is find the ARV. ARV stands for the After Repair Value. The property that we're working on, let's say we're working on one property at a time, that's called the subject property. Now for the ARV, we need to find comparable properties. Let me give you an example. Okay. If the subject property we're working on is a ... Let's say three bed, two bathhouse, all right, 1,200 square feet. That's the property. That's the hot lead we called on, three bed, two bathhouse, 1,200 square feet. What we want to do now is find properties that have sold in the last six months, not two years ago, last six months within a half a mile radius with the same bed, bath counts, in the same city, in the same zip code plus or minus 20% of the square footage of this property, so about 1,000 square feet to 1,400 square feet. We're looking at houses that have sold and that are renovated in that particular area. Because we're trying to find what is the future value of this property we're wholesaling once it's renovated by our cash buyer and once it's resold. Okay. That's important to understand. It's important to understand how the fix and flip business model works so that you can get the largest wholesale fee possible and you don't bring silly deals to cash buyers that they don't want. We find the ARV. If you can compare apples to apples, you're going to be winning. If you can find other three bed, two baths, 1,200 square feet that are renovated, then you'll probably be able to find that ARV. This is exactly what we do every single week with our clients. We help analyze their deals all across the nation. We use this strategy to find the ARV, which is so important. Let's just say the ARV was 300,000, for example, because we found three comps that were at 310, 290, and 300. All right. Now we know that ARV is 300,000. Now for repairs. This is something that no one's great at analyzing for repairs every single time, every single deal. It's always my goal to get within $3,000 to $5,000 of the true repair costs of running this property. Let's say our subject property was a three bed, two bath, 1,200 square feet, and just need all cosmetic renovation. It didn't need a new roof. It didn't have a crack slab that need repair. All that needed to happen was new flooring, paint, redo the kitchen, redo the bathrooms and all cosmetic work. Paint interior, exterior, some landscaping, nothing major, nothing constructional that we're not adding square footage to the property. A rule of thumb you can use to start with and you're going to want to hone this in over time, if a property needs all cosmetic work, you can use $30 per square foot. All right. Let's say our subject property was a cosmetic fixer. You times $30 times 1,200 square feet, you're going to get an estimated repair cost of 36,000. You can go ahead and use your repair cost as 36,000 for this particular deal. You're probably going to be plus or minus $3,000 to $5,000 away. But it's important that you understand you don't need to be perfect on your repair estimate because the only person who knows exactly what the repair estimate's going to be on a house is the actual general contractor that your cash buyer is using. I've been working hard at it for a long time. I can't read mines. I can't predict the future. Don't worry about it. As long as we can get close, we're able to move forward. As you can see, speed is part of the name of the game here. We're not trying to be perfect and take days to analyze a property because good deals go quickly. It's important to get the ARV. It's important to get the repairs numbers down and I'll give you a tip. How we hone this repairs number over time is once we start to get deals under contract, we send them to our cash buyers. We can get feedback from our cash buyers on how our numbers look and we can ask our cash buyers, how do you estimate repairs? Now you're going to be able to find the exact dollar per square foot number for each of your cash buyers that you can multiply times a square footage of the property to get the exact repairs every single time your market so you can analyze for repairs just like that, very, very quickly. All right. Let's keep moving. We get repairs. It's cosmetic fixer, 36,000; ARV is 300K. Now for the wholesale fee, I recommend always aiming for $10,000 or more. That way, if push comes to shove and you need to negotiate a little bit, you can always shave off a little money off of your wholesale fee. But at least we're starting with a reasonable amount that you'll be happy with on each and every deal. $10,000 is a great starting point. All right, 10,000. Now from there, we're able to know exactly where we need to offer. What we use now, after doing this for about a decade, we have our own spreadsheets and calculators. We get the exact dollar from out and we can get the largest wholesale fee possible by knowing every single number on the deals. But essentially what you're doing is projecting what's the profit of our cash buyer going to be, and then making sure it's a profitable deal for them. It's met their criteria of what they want. Once again, step two, we find those three to five cash buyers. We talk to them. We find their buying criteria. We find exactly what they want. That when we find deals on the market, we're finding the exact deals that they want and the zip codes that they want and it meets the profit that they want. Once again, we use a lot of different calculators and spreadsheets to calculate this, but I'll give you a simple formula today. That is a little elementary, but will help you get started in a wholesale of house in 21 days or less. All right. The formula is ARV times 70%, and this 70% is adjustable, I'm about to show you that in a second, minus repairs, minus your wholesale fee. All right. Let's do that math. That ARV is 300K times 70. Let me just double check my work. That's 210,000, all right, minus repairs, 36,000 minus the wholesale fee of 10K and let's calculate all that. All right. 164 Is your maximum allowable offer on where you're able to offer in this particular deal where you can make a $10,000 wholesale fee. Now, here's the caveat to this, 70% of the ARV is very, very low and some fix and flippers will tell you, "Hey, I'm only going to buy it 70% of the ARV minus repairs, minus wholesale fee." But know that you can go up to 80%. Use that formula with 80%. Today, there are definitely fix and flippers buying at 80% of the ARV minus repairs and minus the wholesale fee. Let me just show you real quick just how important that is, because at 70% we can offer 164. But if I do 70% times 300 once again and we have 210K minus ... Oh, we want to go 80%, 80% that's 240K minus 36K minus 10K. Been a little messy here. But essentially what's going to happen is we can offer now 194K on that property. That's a big swing. Okay. What I want you to notice is depending on the formula our cash buyers are using, we can have a $30,000 swing of where we have to put this property under contract and sell it to our cash buyer for, okay. That's really important. When we talk with our cash buyers, they may tell you 70% of the ARV they're willing to buy minus repairs and the wholesale fee. But keep in mind you get a deal at 75%, 80%, 82% of the ARV minus repairs and the wholesale fee. Guess what? Still send it to them. because when push comes to shove, a lot of these cash buyers are still going to buy these houses at 80% of the ARV minus repairs minus the wholesale fee. All right. That's how we reverse engineer the deal. Let's just say on this particular deal, we do all the math. I'll put these numbers here. We analyze this deal. We got the ARV. We got the ARV at 300,000. We have repairs at 36,000. We know our wholesale fee is going to be 10K. With all of this in mind, we know we have to offer at 194. Okay. Boom. Now we know our offer price where we need to offer on this particular deal. 194, 80% of ARV minus repairs minus our wholesale fee. We're doing really good here. Okay. Once again, that's 80%. That's going to be 240K. Now we know exactly where we need to offer, 194K. We can go back to the real estate agent. This is step six. Call back the real estate agent. The same agent we were talking to the whole entire time, call him back. I have to call this the close call. The first one is discovery call. We're building rapport. We're understanding about the property. We're understanding about the competition. We'll leave that call saying, "Hey, we're going to go analyze the deal to go review with our team. We'll get back to you. We'll give you a no nonsense offer we can stick to." Then we further analyze that property. We know exactly where we know to offer. Okay. I'm taking some time explaining this for you. But you'll be able to do this very quickly within 30 minutes on a deal to get these deals under contract and submit offers constantly on these deals. All Right. Now we know exactly we need to offer. We can call this real estate agent and discuss the offer price and discuss putting it under contract at that number. If you did a great job of finding a distressed house that needs to go all cash because it's moldy, there's water damage, it's outdated, and the seller is in a distressed situation as well. There's motivation for this property to sell cash. There's motivation for this property to sell below market value. All right. Keep that in mind. When you talk to the agent, let them know, check back in with them when you give them a call because they might not remember. You could say, "Hey, this is Alex again with XYZ homes. We talked a couple hours ago and I just want to let you know, I met with my team. We're very excited about working with you on this particular deal. We can actually come in on this house today. We can have you represent us and we can offer $194,000 on this deal." What you want to do, you might have to talk them into your offer a little bit. One thing I always like to say is, "Well, an offer's better than no offer." What I want you to understand is I've had so many agents tell me throughout the years that, "Hey, that's never going to work." Guess what? I still submit an offer and it works. All right. It's our goal. When we're talking and working with real estate agents and we're using the strategy, it's always your goal to work with the listing agent who's selling the property. What's beautiful about this process, we're not dealing with anything off market. I'm not telling you to write up your own contract. In fact, if you write up your own contract, send it to an agent on a house on the market, you're going to look silly. You're going to look like an amateur. When we work with real estate agents, they write up the contract for us. It's our goal to call this agent back and have that listing agent write up the contract for you, all right, and represent you as your buyer's agent. What's really important that you understand is if that listing agent represents you as your buyer's agent, they're going to make twice as much commission on this deal. That's a big incentive for a real estate agent to go with your offer versus another offer. All right. Once again, it's the goal that the listing agent will represent your offer. They make twice as much commission. Technically they'll become your buyer's agent. Now that listing agent is not open to doing that. The next best thing you can do is ask for a referral from the listing agent, someone they know that can represent you, maybe within their brokerage or a friend of theirs. Why is that the next best thing, when a listing agent refers another agent to a buyer or sell a property, that agent's going to represent that buyer, for example, and they're going to get a commission. That listing agent can get a referral commission typically about 25% of their commission. They could still make a grand, two grand, three grand, or even more just from making that referral. That the listing agent is still somewhat incentivized to go with your offer versus another offer. Listing agent, then a referral from the listing agent. If you can't get a referral from the listing agent, what's the next best thing for you to do, to get an offer in on this property is to find an Investor-Friendly real estate agent that can represent you so you can get your offer in on this house. Now, one thing to keep in mind, that listing agent on every single house representing you, that's legal in a majority of states, some states they don't want that listing agent to represent you as a buyer's agent as well. What you can do, and typically in those states that broker, there's always a listing broker can then become an intermediary broker or transactional broker so that the broker can at least represent both sides. You can still make it incentivizing for that broker. No matter what state you're in, ask the agent, they're open to representing you, because sometimes they say "Yes," and then they'll say, "I'll just have a friend represent you. I'll just have a referral represent you and they still make it work." That hierarchy, once again, listing agent represents you, if not a referral. If not, work with an Investor-Friendly real estate agent that can write up your offers for you, represent you as your buyer's agent. You can meet these agents in Facebook groups. Just look in your area, real estate agents, type in your area. Facebook, you can go to real Estate Investor Association Meetings, just Google Real Estate Investor Association Meeting and your city name. Then you can attend those. That's where real estate investors hang out. People are interested in working with real estate investors. Or heck, you can just go on the MLS, Redfin, Zillow, Realtor, and start cold calling if you want. But it's a lot easier to just go to these Facebook groups and say, "Hey, I'm looking to work with an investor from the agent and put in multiple offers every single week. Is anyone willing to work with me?" Now you can start getting warm leads and getting people contacting you. We call back the agent. We agree upon that price. We agree upon terms. Typically, when we're wholesaling a house or we're competing with other investor offers, a couple things important. Typically, this seller is going to want a quicker closing timeframe. For some basic foundational terms that you want an offer typically, like a 14-day close, that means from the day you put your contract, 14 days later, it's going to close. Then this is really important. Every single contract you're starting out, put an inspection contingency in the deal. Most of these contracts that we use, actually, in fact, every contract I've seen when working with real estate agents has an inspection contingency clause in there. Make sure that's at least seven days when we're dealing on the market. That inspection contingency says, "You're able to back out this deal if it doesn't pass your personal inspection." That's very important. That is your backout clause. All right. I don't recommend if you're just starting out. If you're a beginner and you want to start wholesaling, never submit an offer without inspection contingency clause. Otherwise, you're technically saying, "Hey, I'm going to buy this property no matter what." It's really important to have that clause there to where a fire happens day two, guess what? You can back out the contract. You're good. Or let's say you're buying a house and there's tenants in there, or you're looking to wholesale this house. You want that inspection contingency to be as long as possible. Because let's say you have only a three-day inspection contingency and the tenants were supposed to move out day five. But on day four, they tear the house apart. They punch holes in the wall. Technically, you're supposed to buy that house because it's outside of your inspection contingency, given that you didn't have any other inspection contingencies. All right. That's the importance of the inspection contingency and always to work within that contingency. The goal is to wholesale the house before that is over. If you cannot wholesale the house before your inspection contingency is over, pretty much means you found a bad deal or you didn't find the right cash buyers, just so you know. But if you can't wholesale it within that special contingency timeframe, the worst thing you do is cancel the contract. It didn't pass your personal inspection. You're able to be go away, scot-free and go onto the next deal. All right. That's never the goal. We want to close every single deal we put in a contract, but I just can't stress. How important that is. The inspection contingency will keep you protected. All right. Fourteen-day close, seven day inspection contingency, there we go. Typically, EMD is due, our Earnest Money Deposit, is due within 72 hours of this property being put under contract. It's typically anywhere from $500 to $10,000. Now, when working with the house on the market, if you do these steps right, you don't have to put $1 into the deal. If you find three to five cash buyers who are buying deals every single month, you can put this property under contract and not have to put in the EMD. All right. Really important that you understand that. You can wholesale this house in 72 hours once you put it under contract and your cash buyer puts in the earnest money deposit. Once we talk with the agent, we get to that price. Let's just say in this example, the listing agent is writing up the contract for us. What you want to do now is be professional and send the offer terms via email to the agent. Send the offer terms via email to the agent. The agent can put those offer terms in the contract and the agent writes to that contract and sends it back to you via email.