how to close your first wholesale deal in 2026

If you haven't closed your first deal, you're tired of inconsistent months, you don't want to watch YouTube anymore because you don't know which information is correct, or you're tired of analysis paralysis and you actually want to take action to start closing deals and scale your business so you can get out of that 9 to 5, this video is for you. In this video, I will show you actionable steps on what contracts to use, how to talk to sellers, how to talk to buyers, how to negotiate, how to make offers, how to run numbers, how to find title companies, and how to actually get these deals closed. So make sure you watch this full video to have the highest probabilities of actually closing your first one. Now, there's obviously no financial guarantee You could be a homeless guy smoking crack on the side of the street with no access to marketing dollars, not knowing anything about real estate, or simply not being able to have a conversation. But if you actually watch the video, you take action, you will have higher chances of closing that first deal. And if this is the first time you're watching one of my YouTube videos, welcome. My name is Jay. I've been wholesaling real estate for the past 7 years and doing it virtually for 4 years. I make content just like this to help you guys close your first deal or scale your wholesale business. And if you guys like this type of content, like, comment, subscribe, and let's get right into the video. As you can see, this is a check that my company Next Home Solutions received for $30,450. You can call the title company to double-check it so you can make sure it's not fake. And with this deal, it only took us really a couple hours to do from talking to the seller, negotiating the deal, getting it under contract, reaching out to the title company, finding a buyer, negotiating all the logistics, and getting the deal sold. Now let me tell you the super strict qualifications to be able to close your first deal. You don't need a degree. You don't need a real estate license, and you don't need hundreds of thousands of dollars to start because we never actually purchased the properties. We're just middlemen helping sellers find a buyer and helping a buyer find a property. All you need is to be able to speak clearly, have a phone, a laptop, Wi-Fi, understand 5th grade math, division, multiplication, addition, and subtraction, and not be a pussy to quit before you actually close your first deal. Now let me explain the wholesale process as if you were a 5th grader. On the left side, we see this homeowner that's happy as fuck because he's at his dream outcome. He's selling his ugly property for under market value, which is $100,000. Then you have me in the middle. Granted, I'm a little bit pale in this picture and I grew out my beard, but I'm happy as hell because I received a $20,000 payout. Why? By helping the seller get to his dream outcome, which is selling his ugly property. Now, if we look all the way on the right side, we have this guy with a helmet, which we can assume is a real estate investor, a developer, a flipper, a buy and hold investor, a BRRRR investor, whatever. Somebody with money that wants to invest into real estate and buy single family properties or pieces of land to make a profit. As you can see, he's buying this ugly property for $120,000. You might be asking, Jay, why does he not go directly to the seller? The same way you don't go out to the forest, kill a cow, skin it, clean it, put it on the grill, cut it up in all these different pieces, season it, and then eat it. You go to the grocery store for convenience. And granted, you do pay a premium because it's already cut, it's already clean, it's ready to cook and ready to eat. So this guy's doing the exact same thing. He'd rather pay me to go find the deal, deal with the seller, deal with the negotiation, deal with the title issues, deal with the contracts so he can find the investment opportunity on a silver platter and take advantage and flip the property. So he's buying it for $120,000, Seller is happy as hell that he's getting his $100,000, and I'm happy as hell that I'm making a $20,000 fee by connecting a seller to a real estate investor. Now, if we look at these two properties, you might be thinking, these are two different properties, Jay. Are you trying to trick me? Are you trying to scam me? No, this is an example. This ugly property all the way on the left side goes and looks like the property all the way on the right side because of forced appreciation. This real estate investor buys it for $120,000. He probably puts $80,000 into the property. He's all in for $200 grand, and he's going to be able to sell that property to a family for a retail price of around $250,000 to $280,000. He's happy, I'm happy, the seller's happy. Boo-hoo, the rainbow shines. Now what are the takeaways? You market to a motivated seller, you put the property under contract if he's ready to go, you market to a rich buyer, you put him under contract, you bring those two together, and boom, you get paid. Now let's go through the situations a seller's having to where he sacrifices his equity to sell it to a cash investor, AKA us. He's either a tired landlord with tenants that are ruining his property, maybe not paying on time, maybe just causing a headache. It's a failed listing. They try to sell the property on the market and it never sold because of unrealistic prices or condition of the house. They're past due on taxes and they don't have the money to catch up. The house was inherited and it turns out to be a headache more than a benefit. They live outside of the state, so it's a pain in the ass to manage the property. They don't have reliable family members to either rent out the property or take care of it. And they need to sell fast, they can't wait 30 to 90 days on the market. They don't want to make repairs to the property or clean it up themselves. They want to avoid seller commissions and closing costs. Now let's talk about the selling points in which we actually provide value to these sellers. They need to sell fast, so they can't wait 30 to 90 days plus working with a real estate agent or trying to sell it on their own. They don't want to make repairs to the property because they don't have the money or it's not convenient for them. They want to avoid commissions and closing costs because that costs money out of pocket. They don't want to deal with more stressful situations outside of what they already are going through as far as divorce, death, foreclosure. The house is too rough for the MLS, AKA the property's too ugly and too bad of a condition to where a real estate agent cannot sell it on the retail market for the full market value. They want to keep the sale private with no signs, no showings, no photos online. And they're looking for a simple guaranteed solution, not endless buyer negotiations to where it's causing another headache on top of what they're already going through. And they already tried to list it and it didn't sell because of price or condition of the property. Now that we have a rough understanding of what we need to do, where we provide value, how we solve a problem, and who we sell the deals to, now it's time to find a market to target these motivated sellers so we can start making progress on closing our first deal. Your market is so pivotal to actually making progress and getting that first deal closed or actually even talking to motivated sellers. When we look at this map, there's color coded.. You have dark blue, you have green, you have yellow, you have red, you have orange, and you have light blue. My recommendation to any beginner that hasn't had any sales experience, hasn't closed their first deal, hasn't talked to a seller yet, hasn't locked up their first deal, or haven't sold their first deal is to go into a dark blue or light blue markets on the map. Why? Because there's less competition, less wholesalers. The price points are lower, therefore easier to negotiate. And the seller is not a doctor with a million dollar property, or he's not going to be going through a tough situation. When we're talking about metro cities and big states like Texas, Florida, Arizona, New York, California. These are all places where big wholesalers are spending millions of dollars in marketing. And unless you want to be bit by a shark or drown in the deepest pool possible, you want to hop in the kiddie pool, get some work in, get your first couple of deals, get your marketing dollars, and then scale to bigger cities where it's going to be easier to sell deals. Once you have experience, things to look out for when going into your first market, you want to look at crime rate. You want to look at properties on Zillow in that specific market that are actually selling. You want to see flip comps. You want to see properties being sold, you want to see land being developed, and you also want to see focuses on the actual statistics. What are the days on market? How many real estate agents are in the market? How many buyers have purchased for cash in the last 6 months to a year? What is the average price point for a property? If the average price point in the market is $50,000, how do you expect to make $20,000, $30,000? There's simply no room in the deal. So we want to focus on markets where the price points are at a minimum $200,000 to $300,000. That way your 10 to 15% commission is, hey, $30,000 fucking dollars. And with the systems I'm going to show you moving forward, it doesn't matter where you live. I'm based in Dallas, Texas, and I've closed deals in almost all the states where it's legal to wholesale real estate. Now obviously we can't take a flight to that specific city that we picked out to start marketing for our wholesale deals. We have to use softwares that make it efficient and make it easy to make progress as fast as possible. I like to use PropStream. It's $99 a month., but that's what I've been using for the past 7 years and I fully recommend it. I'm going to put a link down below and you can even use a 2-week free trial. As far as your filters for your first list that you're going to be marketing to, I want you to do non-owner occupied, which means that the seller doesn't live in the property where it's going to be harder if they live there for them to actually move out and sell the property for a low price. Then I want you to do high equity because we want room in the deal to actually make a profit and get the deal under contract for lower than market value. Now, as far as ownership, we want to talk to individual owners that don't own more than 5 properties. Because if somebody owns more than 5 properties, they more likely are not going to be going through a tough situation and they're going to be knowing what to do. They're going to be keeping that property for long-term investment. But an individual owner with 2 or 3 properties is more likely to go through a tough situation and want to sell to a wholesaler. Now, as far as your build, we don't want to go under 1950 because it's going to be easier to sell a deal that's newer than one that's built in 1850. As far as land, a lot of people love to ask, Jay, what's the difference between land and single-family homes? It is the exact same thing, except with land you make smaller profits. My recommendation, add it on top of that list with single-family homes and you're going to have more leads to talk to. Now, as far as talking to these sellers, you have two routes. One route, you actually talk to them over the phone. It does take a little bit more time, but it is the cheapest way to actually close your first deal. Or the second route, if you don't have a lot of time but you maybe have a little bit more of a budget, you can actually text these sellers. In my opinion, I will always recommend cold calling if you have the time because it's going to be easier to sort through these leads and not talk to tire kickers. I personally like Batch Dialer, but you can use CallTools, Mojo Dialer, Enzo Dialer, whatever dialer you want to use. As long as you like using it, as long as it works for you and it gives you a good pickup rate, use that. As far as texting, SmarterContact is gonna be more expensive, but delivery rate is gonna be better. Or you can use a GoHighLevel account where you can set up the automations, you can set up the texting, and it's gonna be cheaper, but delivery rate is gonna be lower. As far as your LLC and what you need to actually start marketing, with cold calling, you don't need one. With texting, you need to be A2P approved, have an LLC, have your EIN number, all that stuff sorted out before you can actually send your first text. Now, once you close your first 2 to 3 deals, you have $15,000 to $20,000 put away for another marketing channel, are you ready for inbound leads that are actually more motivated? That's when you jump to Google Ads, YouTube Ads, or Meta Ads. Now, me personally, I currently use all 3 of these marketing strategies to close deals for my wholesale company, but we mostly focus on inbound because it's a higher quality lead, less tire kickers, and easier speed to closing. Now you can go and try to figure out your own ad process and burn a bunch of marketing dollars and not get any deals closed. Or you can work with somebody like me where I set up all the systems for you. I run your ads and all you worry about is closing deals. So if that's something you're interested, click the second link down below. Now that we have the marketing out of the way, now it's time to learn how to actually make an offer. For a regular cash offer, these are going to be the numbers table that you're going to be using to get these deals under contract at the right price to be able to sell it for a profit to a real estate investor and for it to actually make sense for them to actually purchase the property. Take a screenshot, run the numbers, use it. Now, as far as making offers, you have two routes to go. I don't want to complicate the process, but I also want to let you know that just because a cash offer doesn't work, it doesn't mean the wholesale deal isn't a deal. For a cash offer, you're selling to a real estate investor that wants force appreciation into the property by putting money into it, making it look pretty. He wants to close fast. Normally the seller also wants to close fast, and it's the simplest process. But not everybody wants to sell their property for 50 to 60% on the dollar. So an Ovation offer is a better fit for a seller that's okay waiting a little bit longer for the price that he wants. He doesn't care who's actually buying the property. The property is at least a 7 out of 10 condition to where if you take one trip to Lowe's, you can make the property look better with paint, countertops, fixtures, pretty much super simple shit that's not expensive the fix. And for a novation offer, they're getting the exact same benefits. They just have to wait a little bit longer for the price that they want. At the moment, I would say at least 40% of our deals are novations, and novations are being sold to a retail buyer, not a real estate investor. That's why the wait time for the deal to actually close is a little bit longer. And you can take two routes, but I'm not going to go too much into novations because I already have a video on my channel that breaks it down for 30 minutes. So if you want to learn about novations, go watch that one. Now that you have your numbers ran, now that you have a motivated seller, it's time to get the deal under contract. You can use DocuSign, PandaDoc to send over the agreement through email, have them sign it, and make sure you never send it when you're not on the phone with them because you want to handle all objections. You want to make sure that you're educating them on the agreement that they're actually signing because an uneducated seller never takes action and they will ghost. You always want to do it over the phone and you want to pre-objection handle anything that can come up in the future that would get in the way of them making a decision today the moment you make the offer. Now that you have the deal under contract, it's time to find a title company. It is as simple as looking up Dallas title company in this zip code. You reach out to them, you say, hey, my name is Jay, I have an off-market property that I currently have under contract. I'm in the process of looking for a buyer to actually purchase the agreement via assignment. Do you guys work with wholesalers? Do you guys work with double closings? Do you guys work with assignment of contract? And they say yes, they're good on their timeframe. Send over the agreement to the title officer, get the EMD instructions so the buyer can actually submit the earnest money deposit. Once you're done with that, now it's time to build a disco package for your actual property. This is a Google Doc with the pictures of the property, the comps, the property details, profit for the investor that he's going to make, the contact information for yourself and the title company. What title company you're actually using, the closing timeline and access to the property. Is it a lockbox? Do you need to reach out to the tenant to actually get a walkthrough happening? All of the details that you would spend 5 to 10 minutes going back and forth with, you want to put it all in one place, make it look clean, and send that to an investor so they know that you're fucking serious and you're not just a beginner doing this as a side hustle. Now, how to find the actual buyer. I'm not going to go too deep in this video, but again, I have 3 or 4 other videos just specifically about cash buyers. Or what to do once you get the deal under contract. But here you can use Facebook Marketplace, you can use Facebook investment groups, but you have to be careful because there's a lot of wholesalers that are trying to snake you on a deal. You can use Craigslist, you can use Zillow Realtors, or simply just skip trace the properties that were flipped and sold on Zillow and reach out to the buyer directly. You can use Redfin Realtors, you can use PropStream cash buyers list, or one of my favorites, Investorbase.com, where they actually skip trace the property list for you, where you have all the buyers, landlords, flippers, developers. It tells you who buys how many they've bought and what type of buyer they are. Talking with buyers, it's a super, super simple conversation. It's more of a logical sale versus the seller where it's an emotional sale because they put themselves in that position. You're not going to sit here with the real estate investor, hey man, what does this property do for you? What is the next step? What is your dream outcome with this property? It's a logical sale. If the property is going to make money, they should fucking buy it. If they're in the market, they have the cash available and they like the area, you're going to reach out and say, hey Jay, I got a property off market. I'm looking to sell to an investor. Are you currently working in the area? They say yes, send over the disco package while they're on the phone. Ask them if they want to put in an offer, ask them when they're able to walk the property, get that assignment agreement signed, get the earnest money in the door, wait for closing date, and make sure to actually follow up with the seller, follow up with the buyer, follow up with the title company, because you never want them following up with you first. You want to keep everybody on the same page, everybody educated, everybody on progress, how the deal's going. Now here are some dos and don'ts. Always talk on the phone, vet buyers on their past deals and future ones, get them to actually walk the property before they submit an offer, proactively negotiate with them because they're Your first offer is never going to be the best offer. EMD is a requirement. If they don't put down EMD, they will ghost you at the closing table. Make sure it's at least $3,000 to $5,000. No option periods with buyers. The only people that need option periods are wholesalers. No, they can't market it out to other investors because they are the ones that are supposed to buy it. You are the one marketing it to investors. No, you will not sub to the deal. They don't need the information about the seller. They don't need to know how much you have it under contract for. They don't need to count your pockets. Nobody buys sight unseen. That's complete bullshit. No, you will not take less than EMD. Anybody with the New Western tag or says that they work at New Western is not a real buyer. If they aren't willing to show you their past deals, they will not get to see your property or walk the deal. Now, if you guys want to pay me and work one-on-one with me to where I hold your hand throughout the process, and in the first 90 days you close and fund on your first wholesale deal, otherwise I work with you for free until you don't, click that first link down below. This is a one-on-one mentorship. This is not a course, and I only want serious people to actually click that link. If you want to change your life, if you want to close that first deal, if you want to have another income, even if you want to do this as a side hustle with only a couple hours a day, I want to help you close that first deal, and I know I can. So click that first link down below in the description, book a call. I'll be on there. I'll explain the whole process, explain how I can help you, and hopefully we work together. I'll see you guys in the next video. Like, comment, subscribe.