In this instructional video, Nathan Payne explains what a motivated seller is, why motivated sellers are essential to a real‑estate wholesaler’s business, and how to locate them without spending marketing dollars. He defines motivated sellers as owners who need to sell quickly for reasons of speed, convenience, urgency, or property condition. Payne then outlines three primary free lead‑generation methods: (1) joint‑venturing with other wholesalers to connect sellers with buyers and split fees; (2) making offers directly on MLS listings, negotiating with agents and other wholesalers to secure lower purchase prices; and (3) “driving for dollars” – walking or driving through neighborhoods, identifying distressed properties, and knocking on doors. He shares personal anecdotes of deals closed using each method, including a $22,100 profit from an MLS JV and an $18,000 deal from door‑knocking. After finding a motivated seller, Payne advises asking why they’re selling, using Zillow to estimate a low‑ball anchor offer (roughly 50% of market value), then negotiating and assigning the contract to a buyer. He promotes his Painless Wholesaling Mind Map, a masterclass at mypainlessflipping.com, a membership club that offers a 60/40 fee split, and the deal‑submission platform SellYourDeal.io for members. The video ends with a call to like, subscribe, and engage with his free content.
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You ever wonder how to get free motivated seller leads from wholesaling? Let me tell you exactly how Armando did it and how he got this deal. He went on the MLS and found a deal, and that's how he was able to get it for absolutely free. The MLS is free. You can call and make offers to agents and get deals. So he found this house, it was a mobile home, he tore it down, now he's building a brand new house, and now we're filming right outside of it. So if you're a wholesaler motivated seller and you want to know how to get free motivated leads, I have this video right here that breaks it down a little bit further. So check it out. And before you actually check it out, we dive in, go to mypainlessflipping.com for my masterclass where I teach you how to get started in real estate every week for free. Let's dive in this video. I have a tip that I think will help you guys a ton to get deals for free. So stay tuned. I'm really excited for you guys to learn today what is a motivated seller. Also, how do you find these motivated sellers? Also, why do you need to find motivated sellers? Also, what do you do once you find this motivated seller? What do you do to maximize and capitalize on this opportunity? So let's dive right into what is a motivated seller. A motivated seller is anyone that owns a property, a real estate property that has motivation to sell the property. Now you might be like, well, if anyone wants to sell their house, they probably motivated, but that's not what we mean in this situation. Motivated seller means someone that needs to sell quickly, fast, or wants the convenience and ease of a quick sale. Now, most people that list their home might not be that— or list their house for sale or want to sell their house— might not be that motivated. That happens a lot with people who just want to test the market. They can just list the house and be like, look, I don't need to sell my house, but if I get the right offer, I'll sell it. Now, that happens a lot in real estate, but what we want to work with as real estate investors are with people that want to sell their home quickly or that have a timeline that they need to reach so we can benefit them with our service, but we can also get a deal that makes sense for us so we can flip it and turn around and make some money. The lifeblood of a real estate investor's business is literally motivated sellers. If there's no motivation from a seller, there's really no deal. If a seller doesn't want to accomplish something quickly, or they have a property they want to get rid of because the condition's bad, or they don't want to sell because of convenience or speed or ease or just getting it done, or any of the 4 pillars of motivation, if there's not something that's causing them to want to sell, then there's really no reason for them to sell to an investor. If someone wants to sell sell their house and they don't really care if they sell it and they can wait 5, 10 years, it doesn't matter, it's not a burden, then they're just going to wait till someone either overpays or gives them exactly what they want. It's just how it is, supply and demand. If you have something that you don't really need to get rid of, then you're not going to take an offer unless it's exactly what you want. You're not going to be motivated. So again, being a real estate investor, the lifeblood of your business is finding people that have motivation where your service— because you're technically a service as a cash buyer, you're providing service, in return you're giving them a service of being able to buy the house quickly, you know, conveniently. Like I keep on saying, quick, convenience, ease, and speed. If you can provide that, in return people will give up equity, they'll sell it to you at a good deal. If you provide that and it serves no value to someone, then there's really no reason for them to sell you the deal. So those are some of the reasons on why, how you can benefit people and why motivation is the lifeblood of the business. So you're probably wondering, okay Nate, that's great, I want to work with motivated sellers, but where do I find them and where do I find them for free? Because, you know, if you're into this business and you don't have the marketing dollars to spend on the mailers, the texting, the cold calling, the RVMs, any of that stuff, if you don't have the pay-per-click dollars, any of that money to market monthly and consistently, you're like, well, well, how do I find these motivated sellers? Well, I'm going to tell you. Okay, but first, before I tell you, I want to give you something that's going to actually answer that question. What I want to give you guys is my mind map. Now, my mind map, what it does, it's called the Painless Wholesaling Mind Map. It lays out the process how to wholesale from start to finish. And in step 5, I go— I believe it's step 5, might be 5 or 6— it goes through how exactly to market to find sellers. And it has a section on how to market to sellers or how to find sellers for free. And in this mind map, I lay out everything for you. So go to the link below, check it out. I'm— in this video, I'm going to explain to you a little bit more about some of the scenarios and the ways to find it. But if you want to know all of them, go check out the mind map. I have written out all the strategies to find free motivated sellers and the ways to do it on my mind map. But I'm just going to go across a couple and how I've gotten deals from it and how it works. So number 1, I love to JV with people. Okay, so JVing, what that is, it's called— it stands for joint venture. And what joint venture is, is when a wholesaler has a deal that they found a motivated seller, they now need help finding a buyer. And what I do, what I specialize in, in the reverse wholesaling, painless wholesaling method, is I have relationships with buyers. I can dispose property anywhere in the country. I can connect a wholesaler or a seller with an end buyer and make a fee. So that is one of the ways that I get deals for free, zero marketing spend. I just let wholesalers know and other people that have deals that I have a buyer for them, and they in turn are willing to work with me with doing a 50/50 split. If you're a part of my club, my Painless Wholesaling Club, the monthly membership, I give you 60% and I take 40%. So I actually give you a little bit more. And the reason why I love this strategy is because I didn't have to spend any money finding the seller. I didn't have to negotiate with the seller. I didn't have to do anything. All I did is I talked to the wholesaler and I connected them with a buyer, and we split the wholesale fee of 50/50, or like I said, if you're in my club, 60/40. That's one of the top ways I get deals is through joint venturing, JVing with other wholesalers. So that's one. Another one of the strategies that I love using to find free deals, free sellers, is the MLS. I know a lot of you, when I first started, and I know a lot of you probably believe that you can't find deals to wholesale off the MLS. I believed that when I first started, so I never made deal MLS offers, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. I just did a deal and made $22,100 on this deal off of a JV deal, but it came from the MLS. We had made an offer to an agent that— to a seller that the agent represented, and they had listed the house for $450,000 on the MLS. I had called the agent to make the offer at $325,000 because that's where it really needed to be. The agent went way too high. The agent said no. He said they had a better offer. So then I was like, whatever, that's where it needs to be for it to be a deal. Later, I saw that another wholesaler that I know in my network had locked up that same property at $375,000. So I was at $325,000, they were at $375,000. I reached out to the wholesaler and I said, "Hey, look, I made an offer on this deal. I have a buyer, but you're still too high." And then the wholesaler that I'm working with is like, "Yes, I know I'm too high." I said, "Renegotiate that deal down to $320,000, $330,000, $335,000, and I have a buyer for you." We signed a JV agreement. They negotiated it down to $330,000. We later found out that that exact same house had issues with the property line and that it was going to cost more money to fix that property line issue. So we actually got that deal down to $320,000. And the cool thing about that is my offer at $325,000, he should have accepted that, but you know, we got him down to $320,000. So we were able to assign that deal to a buyer for $345,000. We had a little fees that we had to pay to, you know, remediate and fix the property line issues. But all I'm saying is because of my free strategy of networking and JVing with other wholesalers and also making offers on the MLS, through those free strategies, I was able to make a $22,100 deal that I split 50/50 with the wholesaler. That is freaking music to my ears. It's amazing because again, I didn't spend any money and you can do it too. Another free way to find deals is driving for dollars. Now I know that incurs— there's a little bit of cost in that because you've got to drive a little bit, but you can walk through your neighborhood. That's free. Walk through a neighborhood, mark down properties that are distressed, that look like they need to be flipped. Go knock on the door. That's free. Go say, hey, you know, I'm buying properties in the area. I work for an investor. That is, are you selling? That is one of the best ways to find motivated sellers, motivated deals, people that want to sell because, you know, this is not on a list. You got to go find it. So the chances of other people blasting these, these homes and trying to market them are pretty low. So that is one of the other ways that I love to find motivated sellers for free is driving for dollars and, you know, knocking on doors. As we're talking about driving for dollars and knocking on doors, I want to let you know that one of my first deals came from knocking on doors. I came from the door-to-door industry and I didn't know how to market, so I just went and knocked doors. And I got, I think one of my second deals was an $18,000 deal from me knocking on a door and talking to a lady who wanted to sell her house because she wanted to downsize. So that's a free method and it works. Now I'm not telling you to go knock every door in your, in the area. Knock on the houses that look like they need a little bit of work. Try it, it'll work. So now that you know how to get deals for free, with little to no marketing spend. What do you do when you find a motivated seller? It's pretty simple. You ask them why they're selling. You kind of find out the situation when they'd like to sell and you make them an offer. Now, if you don't know how to run comps and make the like a legit, legit offer, I'm going to give you a really easy way to do it. Go to Zillow, type in their address and offer 50% of the value of their home. Now, I know that's probably crazy and you think that's super low, but it's an anchor. You anchor them down and then if they are close to that or they're willing to negotiate, you have someone that's motivated. And then all you have to do at this point is just negotiate, you know, call me, call someone in your area that knows the area, and we can kind of help you find a final offer that will work. But basically, that's as simple as that. You find a motivated seller, you make them an offer, and you tell them, hey, you can buy the house, and then you find a buyer for it. Now I have a tool for you guys that I think will help you out. So I have a website called SellYourDeal.io, and what it is, is it's a site that lets you submit deals that you have under contract So you can have, have us help you find a buyer, or if you don't have it under contract, you can submit a deal and we will review it. Now, this is exclusive to people that I work with in my program. It's, I have a program that's $50 a month to help brand new wholesalers that want to get into the industry. If you are in this program, you're able to submit deals you have under contract for us to help you find a buyer and JV with. You get an exclusive community that helps you JV, and you can submit deals and I'll look at them even if they're not under contract. So if you are interested in working with motivated sellers and getting in this industry, I've created a way on SellYourDeal.io to help you out. Check it out. So if you like this content, please like and subscribe so we can give you more content of what this real estate investing actually looks like.
