Wouldn’t it be amazing if you never ran out of deals? Well, by asking the right questions and presenting the right offers, your investment opportunities could be endless.
Whitney Nicely, who is a contractor, broker, auctioneer, investor and self-proclaimed Millennial Millionaire Next Door, coaches real estate investors on how to uncover the best deals in the market. The reason why she can teach this investment strategy is because she’s followed it herself. She’s purchased industrial land, single families, small multifamily properties, and large multifamily buildings putting little money down, using creative investment strategies, and at prices below market value.
In our recent conversation, Whitney explained how she approaches deals in order to continue to find an endless stream of highly motivated sellers.
Whitney’s Best Ever advice for finding deals is simple to say, but difficult in practice – Keep going! “Keep going,” Whitney said. “If it’s a good deal, keep going. If it’s a bad deal, keep going. Don’t stop, keep going. My favorite Bible verse is Proverbs [31:16], which says that she goes to inspect a field, and she buys it. So ladies, go buy it. Men, go buy it. Figure it out, get a plan and go buy it.”
Now you may be thinking to yourself, “Well obviously Joe. But what does she mean ‘If it’s a bad deal, keep going?’ We don’t want to buy bad deals, right?”
Right. However, when Whitney says, “keep going,” she doesn’t mean, “keep buying.” The goal is to always press the seller for their pain point. “Whenever I’m buying a property, whether I’m buying land or a house or an apartment complex – and I teach all my students this – you have to find out what the seller’s pain is,” Whitney said. “If you can solve somebody’s problem, you’ll never run out of opportunities. If you’re afraid to ask what their pain is, or if you keep finding people with no pain, you need to go find somebody else, because there’s plenty of people out here in the world with properties they don’t want, houses they don’t want to take care of, and they just want somebody to come through and take this headache away from them so they can sleep at night. So as long as you’re actually helping people and not trying to be sleazy or slummy or anything like that, you’ll never run out of buying opportunities.”
If someone is selling a property, they are doing it for a reason. Likely, the reason is to alleviate some sort of pain. Whitney said, “Another thing I tell my students is it may not be that a lump sum cash payout is what [the seller is] stressed over. If that’s what their pain is, then solve that pain.”
If you can’t find the pain point, or the seller doesn’t have one, then Whitney’s next step is to make an offer. Not just one offer, but three. Providing multiple offers is a good way to indirectly discover a seller’s hidden pain point (or another pain point). Whitney said, “When you go look at a house, don’t be a one-hit wonder. Don’t make one offer. Don’t solve just one thing and then be like ‘Poof! I’m gone.’ I want you to take a cash offer. I want you to take a five-year payout offer, and a ten-year payoff number. You’d be surprised.” For example, Whitney submitted these three offers on a past deal and walked away with a 15-year owner-financed deal with no money down, no down payments for four months, and a completely reasonable monthly payment. She said, “Be open for those and never stop negotiating.”
The cash offer would be so low that if the seller accepted, it would be the best deal ever. Then, the five-year payout offer is higher and the ten-year payout would be the highest. For the payout offers, you can either form the deal so that you must have them paid off or you can form it with a balloon payment. When that five or ten years is up, you’ll have a massive net worth and you can cash out, you’ll have private money investors or partners to cash you out, the tenant buyer will cash you out (if you signed a five or ten year lease option with your tenant), or you can renegotiate with the original seller and make another deal.
Whitney’s best ever deal was her last deal, which was a creative/pain point combo. “I had a house. It was three-bedroom, two-bath, and the backside of it had caught on fire a number of years back (pain point #1). I had it under contract for a lease option for $6,000 with $100 [down] and $200/month paid off whenever it was I paid off $6,000, so 5 to 6 years at $200/month,” she said. “I sold it on a lease option for $12,000, with $5,000 down and $300/month. So I bought it for $6,000, I sold it for $12,000. This morning, I was talking to my seller and he was like, ‘Well what if we didn’t do the lease option? How much would you give me just to cash out?’ (pain point #2) and I said, ‘I could give you $3000,’ and he said, ‘Okay fine.’ So now I bought the house, people gave me $5000, I’m giving it to my seller, and I get to keep $2000, and now I’m cash flowing $300/month on a $7,000 balance.” In this scenario, the seller just wanted cash now, not later, to be out of the property. Whitney gave the seller $3000 of the $5000 tenant’s down payment and won’t have to pay the seller another dime.
Related: Two Creative Rent-To-Own Strategies with NOTHING Out-of-Pocket
Whitney’s parting advice is to “Keep going. Find out what they really want, give it to them, and make sure you are okay.”
To hear about more of Whitney’s creative deals, including how she got two tenants to lease out a piece of vacant land, How She Became the MILLENNIAL MILLIONAIRE NEXT DOOR Did you like this blog post? If so, please feel free to share it using the social media buttons on this page.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as an offer to buy or sell any securities or to make or consider any investment or course of action.