In this video Fidel Guajardo reflects on the recent exit of top wholesaler Ryan Pineda, recounting how Pineda’s mentorship shaped his own real‑estate career and the costly mistakes he made. Guajardo explains that after completing over 200 deals, he suffered heavy losses from house flips between 2023‑2025, which forced his wholesale profits to cover hard‑money and private‑lender debt. He argues that the current market downturn creates opportunities for wholesalers who adopt a hyper‑niche, hyper‑local approach: in‑person seller meetings, deep 40‑minute sales calls for virtual leads, and aggressive rapport‑building. He outlines a lean, AI‑augmented marketing plan that spends $4‑5 K/month on Facebook ads and leverages Marketplace, while keeping the team small. On the disposition side he will price deals 5‑10 % below market, use his extensive buyer/realtor/lender network, and avoid scaling flips. He stresses obsessive KPI tracking, disciplined cash‑flow management, and mental resilience as the path to recoup losses and thrive despite other wholesalers exiting the space. The video ends with a motivational call to focus on sales, marketing, and disciplined operations.
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If you've been keeping up with real estate wholesaling news, you know that one of the biggest wholesalers, Ryan Pineda, just quit the game. And in this video, I'm going to give you my take, the things that I learned from working with him because he was my first mentor where things went bad for me, and how you as a wholesaler can capitalize in a down market now that everyone is leaving. Now he's exiting because he has other opportunity vehicles, but for most of us and most of you guys, you don't have that luxury because Ryan was one of the first ones who branched out from just being in real estate, and then he kind of became like a marketer, and he already knew how to sell because of wholesaling, right? In 2020, that's when he started making the content, and the more that he grew, He got into other opportunity vehicles that made him more money. Now, the thing with wholesaling is what makes it hard is that fulfillment is hard, right? You can have a property under contract and that does not guarantee that you're going to close the deal because you have, you can have title issues, you can have dispo issues, you have your marketing spend, and you have your cash conversion cycle, which the only thing that matters is when you close a deal, right? But if you have to wait 30, 60, 90 days to sell a deal, you are fronting the marketing costs, you are paying your team even if they don't close, right? So you have this overhead and the only thing that matters is if you close. So Ryan was my first mentor when I I first started in real estate, and thanks to him and what I learned from him, it went beyond just doing deals. He gave me the confidence to go and be a good business owner, to do deals, and to be a good family man and a Christian. So when I talk about him living wholesaling, I'm telling you my experience of me knowing him and working with him. I can appreciate what he taught me, and thanks to him, yes, I was able to do all the different deals. So to give you a quick story, when he started running ads for people with the agency, that's what made me want to learn my own Facebook ads. And since then, thanks to that, you know, I was able to go into the Hermosi workshop and kind of read all of the Hermosi books, and then I learned how to run ads, and now we're able to get a lot of deals. with a better marketing system. And all the marketing that we were doing was just through Facebook. So that's kind of a quick story, one of the things that I learned from him. So I don't know if you knew, but I did more than 200 real estate deals. And when I first bought my first couple houses, the interest rates went from 2% to 7%, and that caused me to lose a ton of money on my first couple properties. So then I had to learn how to wholesale. But ever since I started, I felt like all the money that I was making was kind of going back into repaying lenders. Now in 2023, 2024, and 2025, I had very big losses, and all the profit from my wholesaling business was covering what I owed my private lenders and what owed for the hard money lenders. Because looking back, wholesale was always great for me. It was just the flips that pretty much wrecked me. And if you look into flips, I mean, that's a whole new skillset because now you need to deal with cash flow management, construction, and like I said, you only make money when the property sells. Now, I did take a break from wholesaling the last couple months after the losses. Things just sucked and I got in a bad mental space. Now, number one, I'm going super niche when it comes to my marketing. I just launched my ads this week and already got 3 appointments for tomorrow. So everything that I'm doing is going to be in my market. I'm going in person in order to meet the sellers and negotiate better deals. And since I know everyone in my market, I know how to get new buyers to get into properties with hard money loans or bridge loans. I'm very connected with the realtors. So my goal is to meet the sellers and focus a lot on the pain and what needs to happen in order for them to sell and really digging into the whole situation. And the only way that you do that is if you are able to build rapport. So if in your market, I would consider that you go in person. And actually, I was texting Ryan, and what he told me was that his business coach told him that in order to make this market successful, they need to go in person and negotiate better deals. So that's exactly what I'm doing. And second of all, if you are doing virtual markets, you guys really need to spend at least 40 minutes on the phone call talking to the sellers because you don't want to sound like all the other wholesalers, right? So we want to be able to give them an offer and a solution in a way that we can make $25,000, $30,000 per deal. And you can only do that if you are good at sales, right? So what I'm going to do, it's just going to be me and AI. I'm going to make another video on I'm starting it from scratch with just AI marketing and myself. So I'm going to keep my expenses very low. I'm going to spend between $4,000 to $5,000 per month on Facebook ads. And like I said, I don't want to expand the team, you know, too big because my main goal is to recuperate the money that I lost. So my job and my goal is to, you know, kind of go back to loving it. And, you know, 2023, 2024, those were really good years for me. And as I was able to hire a team, I kind of got complacent. But now, you know, we're in a different season and pretty much like I would encourage you guys, you can still make it work if there's not people that are like marketing, it's better for you because in the end properties still will sell and there's always going to be buyers at the right price. So for you guys, really hone in on the sales and marketing. I just think that you need to be a better operator and better at sales and dispo, right? So second thing is going to be on the dispo side. We're not going to list any properties for market value. We're going to give a discount either from 5% to 10%. And the other thing that I'm doing is I'm marketing the properties on Facebook ads. So I have an admin, we're going to put stuff on Marketplace, which is different from Facebook ads, but since I already know all the agents and the lenders. I'm going to generate my own leads of people that are interested. And on the dispo side, I already have a huge network of buyers, people that know me and people that I know here where I live. So I know that we're going to be able to sell deals much quicker. I'm going to learn from my mistake and not try to scale it so much. I'm not going to do any flips. I'm going to track my KPIs like a maniac, and I'm really going to train the sales process in order to get way better deals. So guys, there's still room for you to make money. And I don't know any other industry where you can make $15,000, $20,000, $40,000 in a single deal if you really focus. And do the work, right? So there's still hope for you. Don't give up. Focus on getting better, and you're going to be able to get way better deals. Follow me down below, and I'll suggest one of my videos down here. But that's all. I'll catch you in the next one. Peace.
