What I Learned from Making $2M+ in WHOLESALE REAL ESTATE

I've made over $2 million wholesaling real estate, and most of it came from doing the exact opposite of what most beginners are taught. In this video, I'm going to be breaking down the biggest lessons I've learned, the craziest deal I've had to deal with personally, what most wholesalers get wrong, the biggest time and money wasters for beginners, and what I would do differently if I had to start all over again from scratch. I'm Nathan Payne, and I've closed hundreds of deals, made millions, and helped hundreds of other investors launch and grow their business. So let's dive right in. Let's kick it off with the biggest lessons I've learned from doing over $2 million, because it's probably not what you think. Number 1 is you have to have a solid sales process. If you do not know how to take a seller from point A to point B to the close table, you're going to struggle. Okay, a lot of people think they can just make lowball offers and find somebody that wants to sell, and then eventually they'll get an offer and they'll accept it, and then you just find it and you dispose to somebody else and you make money. That's technically what wholesaling is. You make an offer, it's lower than what you wholesale it to someone or assign it to someone, but it's not like There's a sales process behind it. You're talking to real people with real problems that want to sell their properties for speed, convenience, and ease. All right, and your goal is to get them to know, like, and trust you and build a relationship where they want to sell their— most likely the biggest asset they'll ever own. They're going to want to sell it to you, and they trust you that you're going to be able to get done what you say you're going to get done. Now, most of the problem with wholesalers is they don't really know what they're doing, right? So they're making offers that they can't keep, Sellers have been through talking to other wholesalers, so they, they're already skeptical, right? They're not sure who you are. Even if you meet with them in person, they don't know if they can trust you. So you have to be able to gain their trust. And how do you gain trust is by having a good sales process, by being knowledgeable, and by letting them know that you can take care of them and solve their problems. So you need a solid sales process in order to scale and grow and crush it in this business. Now, just as important as the sales process is having enough leads. Now, a lot of people don't succeed in this business and they think it's because this business doesn't work, but they just haven't had enough opportunities to try and close, right? To talk to people that want to sell. So if you aren't generating enough leads, you're not going to do enough deals, especially if your sales process sucks, because then you're going to need more and more leads to close the deal. Now, on average, let me give you some averages. I was talking to some paper lead providers and they were saying that it takes average of 30 to 50 leads to close a deal on their service, right? And then let's say they're $100 a lead. So you're talking $3,000 to $5,000 to close a deal. And a lot of people aren't even getting that many leads. And by leads, I say people who want to sell, right? Doesn't matter if they want— they want to sell for cash or not. Let's just say people want to sell their house. They're not getting to talk to 30 to 50 people that want to sell. I've talked to a lot of people that generate their own leads and they're trying to do driving for dollars and they're trying to do list stacking, all this stuff, and they're not even getting enough to 30 to 50 people that want to sell. They're just talking to a lot of people. The people are like, nah, get lost. I'm saying if you want to close a deal when it comes to pay-per-lead or pay-per-click or whatever, it's usually 30 to 50 people who want to sell to close a deal. Okay, so if you're not even close to that, just those are the numbers. That's the average. Now for me, and I'm going to be getting into this in a little bit, like how you can trim down that average range of how many sellers you need to close a deal, I'm able to do 1 in 20, right? Because of the sales process I have and the strategies that I use, the extra strategies, I can self-solve problems without just wholesaling. Because I think if you're just a one-trick pony and all you do is wholesale, you're gonna struggle in this business, right? You have to have more than one extra strategy to close deals. So anyway, you need leads. Now there's so many different ways to get leads, but if you have money, I'm going to break it down to this. If you have a marketing budget, do pay-per-lead or pay-per-click, okay? Those are people that want to sell. Now if you don't have marketing budget and you're just got hustle and grind and you have time, then you're going to want to stack lists. You're going want to do this list. Pre-foreclosure, you're going to want to do probate. Also, this is another good one. This is a list that you're going to want to stack: absentee owner that's out of state, high equity, and vacant. Okay, that's a good indicator that someone wants to sell is if they own a rental in a state that they don't live in and they have a lot of equity in it and it's vacant. Now, when it comes to the sales process, you want to be able to have multiple ways to solve sellers' problems. Now, if your best way to solve a seller's problem is with a wholesale cash offer where you can close on their house fast, quick, and easy and convenient, close in 5 days, 7 days. That's good, that's a good way you can solve a problem 'cause most sellers need to sell fast that we work with, but that is not always what they need. Sometimes sellers want more time. They want to stay in the house. They want post-possession. They want to stay in after you close. So if you don't know how to work in deals that are like novations where you can get people more money, where you get the property listed on the MLS, if you don't know how to do creative deals, subject to, if you don't know how to do seller financing, if you don't know how to structure that, You need to learn those skill sets. You need to learn those strategies so you can close more deals. And wholesale, BRRRR, if you don't know how to take a property down yourself without spending any of your money, you need to learn that. Because what happens is if you have a cash offer that's too low, they're motivated, but they can't go that low, or they don't, they're not willing to go low, but they have a problem, you can always throw out different options like creative or novation or, or wholesale or BRRRR. Okay? So you need to have multiple exit strategies. And I say like multiple arrows in your quiver, right? Or multiple tools in your toolset to close more deals. That's how you're gonna make more money. Now, this is huge as well, is niching down on one marketing strategy. In the beginning, you wanna do one marketing strategy. Now, if you get tons and tons of money later and you can have a huge marketing budget, that's fine, be omnipresent. Do texting, cold calling, RVM, do pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, do 'em all, do mail. But in the beginning, it's going to be difficult for you to manage all those marketing channels. So just pick one. Now finally, joining an apprenticeship or a mentorship or a community where there are people that are doing deals is very important because it's going to keep you motivated and you're going to see that this business works. You need to go work with someone that's doing deals, okay? Not that's done deals and is teaching you an outdated strategy. Someone that currently is doing deals, okay? Now if you want help implementing all these lessons that I learned and actually closing deals, That's exactly what we do in the Painless Flipping Apprenticeship, so check out the link below. Now let me tell you about the craziest deal that I personally had to deal with and the painful and brutal lessons I learned from having to fly to California to kick out a squatter personally. All right, so this deal happened, I think it was a couple years into doing my business when I had gone nationwide. I decided to do a nationwide pay-per-click campaign, and one of the first leads we got was from Rialto, California. What had happened on this deal is we got it under contract for $80,000. We ended up not having buyers there in the beginning because we just started nationwide wholesaling, but I knew a wholesaler that we had helped wholesale a deal in my market of Salt Lake City, Utah. So I reached out to him. I said, hey, I got a deal for $80,000. Can you help us find a buyer? He ended up finding a buyer for $120,000 really fast. So I was like, oh great, $40,000 deal. This nationwide thing is great. Ended up happening the day of close, the seller tried to back out of the deal and said, hey, I'm giving you guys way too good of a deal. Give me $90,000 or I'm walking. Now, we were still pretty new, even 2 years in, like we didn't really know how to deal with this situation, never had it happen before. So we just said, how much do you want? She wanted $90,000. So we're like, okay, fine, we'll give you $90,000. Because we didn't know what I know now. Now I would have been like, hey, yeah, sorry, you can't do that. You don't just get to demand more money at close. But anyway, we agreed for $90,000. Then what ended up happening is the buyer that guy was bringing that we were JVing with ended up bailing last minute. He's like, oh yeah, I don't want this deal anymore. So we're stuck with a seller that wants more money and We still think it's a great deal. So I ended up buying it with my own money. So now I own this property in Rialto, California, and don't really know much about it other than it was a good deal. Okay. So the next couple of days I tried dispoing it. I go on Facebook groups and I'm trying to find people that want to buy it. And we're starting to send a bunch of buyers through. A lot of interest on it, right? We're getting offers at $120,000, $130,000. So I was like, oh, this is fine. What ended up happening is we started sending buyers there and all the buyers are like, hey, you know, there's a gate and there's a fence that surrounds this property and we can't get in. It's all locked. And we're like, we'll just jump the fence. Okay, just jump. And they're guys, everyone's like, dude, it's a big fence. It's like 12 feet. It's super high or something like really high fence. So ended up happening that the buyers that were interested hopped the fence and they're like, hey, did you know there's a squatter that lives in here? And I was like, I did not know there's a squatter that lives in there. Can you tell him to leave? Because in Salt Lake City, Utah, if there's a squatter, you just call the cops. You tell them to leave. Majority of the time, they're just going to get out of there. But in California, it's different. So they told this guy to leave and this guy had been living there for a while. We just didn't know. The seller didn't really tell us or explain to us like, hey, there's someone living in there. Anyway, I tell one of the buyers that really wants it at $130,000, I say, "Can you just tell the guy to leave?" The squatter ended up telling him, when then he told us, that he demanded $2,500 and 30 days to vacate, and then he would think about leaving. So we were caught in a place where I had a property that I owned, right? And we had a squatter that was holding it hostage and saying, "Give me $2,500 and I'll think about moving." And at that time, I was like, "Nah, I'm not going to get played like that by Some guy that doesn't even own it, he's just squatting in there. So the next day I got on a flight, flew with my business partner Corey at the time, and we were like, we're going to get this guy out. So we knew that there was a gate surrounding the whole property that was locked. But what our strategy was, this is so stupid, but we were going to try and cut the lock off the gate, which is fine, right? But if we couldn't get the lock off the gate, we ended up getting a rental van, like a giant 10-passenger van, one of those giant white vans with full insurance. On this thing. And we were like, hey, if we can't get this gate, like, with the lock cut off, we're just going to ram the gate down and just blast it. And when we went to the car rental place, we're like, hey, is this thing fully insured? Like, even if we run into anything, like, is there any problems with it? And the guy's like, no, it's fully insured. So I was like, okay, we can blast this gate if this is going to be a problem. And then we went to Home Depot. Hopefully we're going to find some people that were going to be able to board up the property because it wasn't boarded up. The property was in bad shape, but Obviously, the squatter lived in there, so he could get inside. So the goal was to like cut the lock off the gate, go inside, board it up so he couldn't get back in there. What ended up happening is when we went to Home Depot, it was going to be a lot more work to board up that property and pretty expensive to get the boards ourselves and too much work. So let me call some companies that can board up this property so he can't get back in it. I made some phone calls and the companies in the area wanted $2,000 to $3,000 just to board up a property that was vacant. And I was like, no way. That's way too expensive. That's crazy. So my idea was we were just going to go do it ourselves after we got the guy out. So we ended up going to the property. We met the locksmith there and we told him, we're like, hey, look, just keep cutting the lock. If someone comes out, don't stop. Just keep cutting it. And he ended up getting a little nervous, but he was like, whatever. He chops that thing off. It took like 20 seconds and then he takes off. He was trying to get out of there. As we're cutting the lock off the gate, we hear a voice inside and it's a girl's voice. And she's like, what's going on? And I don't bust in the house yet, I'm just in the front yard, and I'm like, "Hey, we're here, we own the house, you guys need to get out." She was like a 45-year-old lady. She comes out and she's like, "Oh my gosh, what's going on?" I don't know if she was strung out or whatever, but we're like, "Hey, we asked you guys to leave. I need you to leave, we own this house." And she's like, "Okay, fine." I think it was the girlfriend of the guy, the squatter that lived there, and she's like, "Let me call whatever his name is and find out what's going on." I'm like, "Yeah, you can call him, but tell him that he needs to move out." But what ended up happening was she called him, and as she got out, we started moving all the stuff out, started boarding up the property. I ended up seeing someone pull over across the street. It was like 2 Mexican guys, and I was like, oh man, this is probably him. So I go up to the car and I say, hey, you live here? And the guy's like, no, I live in the house across the street from this house. And I said, okay, so you guys don't live here. Do you guys want to help me board up this property? And they're like, sure. How much would you do it for? And they're like, I don't know, like $200. I was like, deal, $2,000 or $200. So they came over with their hammers. It was like 2 young guys. So they started boarding up the property. And as they're boarding up the property, the squatter shows up and he shows up with his boss. The boss is fired up and he's like, you can't kick this guy out of this house. This is where he lives. And I say, I own this house. Like, he can't just stay here for free. And the guy's like, well, no, you know, he's squatter rights. I'm the landlord in California and I know that he can stay here. So he's trying to keep his employee there and I'm I'm like, why don't you just pay him more so he can actually buy a real property, right? Like rent somewhere that has running water and is nice. So anyway, he says, I'm calling the cops on you guys. The boss of this guy ends up calling the cops. The squatter goes inside and he's just standing in the doorway and the boss is like, stay right there in the door, don't move. We're not letting these guys take your property. So cops show up and I explain I have the deed and I say, hey, this is my house. This guy's squatting here. He needs to leave. And the cop comes over, he says, look, we've been having some problems with this guy. We're going to get him out. We're going to figure this out. So back and forth, the boss is getting heated on me. He's yelling at me and I'm like, dude, why are you trying to keep this guy in here? Again, just pay him some more money so he can actually afford rent. Ended up happening that the cop said, hey, look, we can technically get this guy out of here. This property has no electricity, no running water, and nothing's turned on. This is a condemned property. So we get code enforcement here. We can condemn it, and nobody can live in a condemned property, so we'll get them out. Code enforcement shows up, they get them out, they say, you got to go. The boss ends up taking all the guy's stuff that he had at the property, and they go off, and they're mad. So luckily, we got it taken care of because the code enforcement got them out. It was a lot of pain and a lot of frustration, and I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know if we're going to have to go to court or what was going to go down, but that was one of the craziest deals I had to deal with. It was a whole crazy mess. But next day I called the buyer that was like, hey, I won't buy this without it being empty. Called him and said, hey, the squatter's out, we boarded it back up and it's good to go. He ended up closing on it that day, sold it, bada bing, bada boom, made $30,000, $40,000 on it. Crazy deal. Whew. I'm telling you guys, this business is wild. Now, we probably wouldn't have had to deal with that if I had a mentor in my corner that could have been like, hey, don't do this, don't do that. Code enforcement, like what I had to learn through doing it myself. If I had someone in my corner, probably could have helped me out. But hey, that's why mentorships, that's why apprenticeships are so important. But I had to deal with that. It was crazy. So one of the craziest deals, it was a good deal, but I wish I didn't have to go fly to California and have to deal with all that crazy. This is exactly why having the right guidance and support is so important. That's why I started the Painless Flipping Apprenticeship, because this is what I needed back in the day. I needed someone to help me walk me through deals and avoid these pitfalls and issues. So check out the link below if you're interested. If I could save beginners from the biggest mistakes that I see over and over, this is what I would tell them. Spending months pulling massive lists and cold calling through your giant lists is a waste of time, okay? The reason why people pull giant lists like that is because they have giant cold calling teams that they hire other virtual assistants and they hammer through it. But if you're going to personally do it, it's a waste of time. If you're going to be doing cold calling and texting, you need to be able to go real niche You need to be able to go and trim your list down because if you're just sitting there on a cold call line dialer just dialing all day, there's better uses of your time. So don't do that. Don't target a giant list and just cold call nonstop yourself. Now, this is huge. You need to be able to study sales and you need to be able to understand the sales process because it doesn't matter how many leads you can generate of people that want to sell if you don't know how to take them to the closing table, know how to negotiate a good deal, how to get a deal under contract that's actually at the right price, know how to find buyers, know how to do what I call pre-flipping, is knowing what to offer even before you make the final offer and get the house under contract. You could potentially waste all your time and get a house under contract, not be able to sell it, and just be demotivated at the end of it and just feel bad because you're like, oh man, I spent all the time and didn't make any money. So make sure that you understand the sales process and know how to dispo deals. I would tell beginners to stop doing activities that are a waste of their time, like building websites, building CRMs, doing things that are not revenue-generating activities. You need to be focusing on things that are help you make money. Talking to sellers, having the right conversation, practicing your sales process, generating more leads. So if you're busy building a website or a business card or a CRM or trying to figure out automations, none of that matters unless you have leads that are coming in, you have a good sales process. Okay, so stop doing things that don't really matter, right? That seem important but that aren't that important. You need to work on things that are going to help you generate money. Okay. Another thing is constantly chasing shiny objects. All right. I know it's hard in the beginning. You want to get into a bunch of different real estate tactics. You see that pad splits are cool. You multifamily, commercial, industrial, land. You got all these things. Just focus, niche down and focus on one thing. You want to focus on single family. You want to focus on your sales process and generating leads. That's what you want to do. Okay. You do not want to just be all over the place chasing multiple rabbits. You're not going to catch any. Okay. So you need to focus, hone in and master your skill set. If you want to avoid all these mistakes and close deals faster, check out the Painless Flipping Apprenticeship in the link below. So if I had to start all over from scratch, this is exactly what I would do differently. I would pick one market. In the market that I would pick, this is how I would do it. I would go to AI, I'd go to ChatGPT, and I would ask them what markets are hottest for wholesaling that are not attorney states, okay? Because I don't want to have to deal with attorney states. I want to do title states, and I want to know high price point areas that are good for wholesaling. 'cause I want to do bigger deals, so I want to go for higher price point places. I would ask AI, then I would go to a data provider like Batch Leads or PropStream, and I would look at how many buyers in the buyer activity in that area, okay? I would then get a 0% interest credit card. I would take this 0% interest credit card, I'd try to get $5,000 to $10,000 balance or more, and I would start doing paper lead. As I was doing paper lead and generating leads, and I would be spending about $100 a lead to $200 a lead, I'd be practicing my sales process, trying to get really good at the process of talking to a seller, helping them identify their options of selling and building trust and just getting better at talking to sellers in general. Don't try to scale too fast. Okay. And that's the problem I had when I first started. I said, how fast can I get out of this business and just hire people to do it? Now, if you try to scale this business and grow too fast, you're going to hire people that aren't going to be that good and you're going to not know what is required to grow the business because you just won't, won't have the experience. So don't try and run and scale and get out of the business as fast as you can. That was a big thing when I first started. Everyone was talking talking about, oh, scale, scale, scale. Scaling can be dangerous in this business because you can end up getting in a lot of debt trying to hire people, trying to buy more leads to produce them for your team. Don't try and scale too fast. Run the business and be profitable first. If you want to start this business the right way and close your first deal with hands-on support, that's what we do in the Painless Flipping Apprenticeship. So check out the link below and book a call. And if you want to hear why I quit my 6-figure job to go all in on wholesaling, click on this video right now. I break it all down.