Building Your Reverse-Wholesale Real Estate Business’s Team

The following is adapted from This Sh*t Works.

With reverse wholesaling, you’re connecting with investment buyers first, and then finding properties they would want to buy. To thrive in this space, you must put the customer experience first. Your success hinges on building relationships with these buyers. But who is going to manage the other aspects of your business?

You can’t go it alone—you need a team supporting your efforts. These people must be invested in your business’s success and include specialists in several areas, including a lead manager, an acquisitions person, a dispositions person, and a transaction coordinator. 

With the right people on your team, you’ll be able to create a customer experience so good that buyers will want to work with you again and again. 

The Roles on Your Team

First, let’s look at the different roles on your team—lead manager, acquisitions person, dispositions person, and transaction coordinator—and explore what they do. 

A lead manager’s only responsibility is to effectively manage the leads, set the appointments, and get the acquisitions person into the house. In a lot of organizations, they’re also responsible for initiating the marketing every month—direct mail, setting up outbound calling campaigns, and outbound voicemail campaigns. Whatever generates the inbound lead in most cases falls underneath the lead manager. 

The acquisitions person has one job: go on as many appointments as they can and get as many contracts in-house as they can. The acquisitions person should be armed with a good outline of how to effectively determine the comparable values of the property (“comps”) using all the tools that are available. 

Your dispositions person is on the other side of the equation. Their responsibility is to engage the buyers, maximize for-sale property prices, and make sure the customer relationship is being nurtured. It is an outbound, outreach job. They create anticipation. This person always knows who’s ready to buy right now.

Lastly, the transaction coordinator has a fairly straightforward purpose: they keep a transaction moving forward. That involves working with the title company to make sure the deal is progressing and doesn’t fall through. 

Keeping Your Team Motivated

Once you have your team together, it’s time to close deals. As the business owner, you’re deeply motivated to see your company succeed, but how can you get your employees on board, too?

To make everybody a part of the deal, you want everybody to get paid out of the deal. If you create a $10,000 wholesale fee, your costs would break down something like this:

First, you spend 20 percent to 25 percent of that on marketing, or effectively $2,500 for this example. You would also pay an additional 10 percent of revenue to your acquisitions person, or $1,000, and another 10 percent to your dispositions person, another $1,000. At this point you’ve spent $4,500 from your $10,000.

The lead manager would get paid the exact same way a transaction coordinator would: an hourly rate plus a fee for every closing. You’re going to have a rough margin here of 45 to 50 percent profit to you, while everybody else is running the deals. The numbers can go up, the numbers can go down, but that’s the basic structure.

With everybody highly incentivized to close more deals, you won’t need to work as hard to keep the ship sailing. 

A Full Team Leads to Passive Income for You

At this point, with a full team of people financially motivated to create a great customer experience, you’ll have all the makings of a successful reverse-wholesale real estate business. You’ll be well positioned to achieve the dream shared by most entrepreneurs: passive income. 

To own and operate a self-sustaining business, empower your people to do the job without your involvement. Set up the company, hire your team, and train them to do the job. Give them rules, and then get out of their way. 

If your team works well with each other, there should be little direct involvement from you required to keep customers buying again and again. 

For more advice on real estate investing, you can find This Sh*t Works on Amazon.

Kent Clothier is the CEO of Real Estate Worldwide, a software training company for real estate investors, and the founder of the Boardroom Mastermind, the most elite real estate investor networking group in the country. He’s flipped thousands of homes over the past fifteen years and helped tens of thousands of people learn how to do the same. He is passionate about teaching what he’s learned in a simple way so that it’s easy for anyone to connect the dots. As a husband and the proud father of three amazing kids, Kent has built the ultimate life for himself and his family.