5 Key Strategies for Thriving in Real Estate Wholesaling

Mike Hambright (00:01.08)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’ve got my buddies, Dane and Sam here joining us from Chicago. They first jumped on, like, are you guys in a rehab right now? If you get, if you’re watching right now, you see that they’re in a, an office that’s framed out. This actually is their office. They’re remodeling. They’re like, this is the quietest room we have in our office right now. So, we’re to be talking about kind of what’s working now. What’s changed over the past year. A lot of people’s cheese has been moved over the past year or two. And, these guys have made a transformation as well, crushing it right now. And we’re going to be talking about kind of what’s working now.

in different departments of the business. So what’s up guys, how are you doing?

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (00:34.847)
Doing well, doing well, Mike, yourself. Likewise.

Mike Hambright (00:36.75)
I’m good, all good, all good here. Excited to see you guys. So, so maybe kind of high level. Let’s kind of jump in. What do guys want to tell us a little bit about your background of your business in Chicago?

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (00:46.431)
Yeah, we Sam and I actually met over a cold call four years ago Got started in the wholesaling business We figured out was the the quickest way in this was early coven we started the started the business on Like those Trump checks that were coming out at the beginning every dollar was going back into Google Sheets and then going into data and then going into marketing and we just really been fortunate to build the business over time and you know now we’re

This year is actually the start of our fifth year of business. And I come from a tech background, so I was working in tech, doing a lot of go-to market stuff, sales enablement, sales management, individual contributor roles. And Sam comes from a construction background, doing a

union concrete. And so when we got on the phone, I mean, I remember like it was yesterday, I was pacing my apartment. We probably talked for like three or four hours. I probably got 10,000 steps in that day. Just, just talking to Sam on the phone. So that’s kind of a little bit about our, our background. And now we’re built a team and we had about seven, six or seven people in the office, three on ACK, one Dispo, one transaction coordinator. And we’re actually looking at another three. So pretty exciting.

Mike Hambright (02:05.806)
Cool, so we’re gonna talk a little about what’s working now for you guys specifically. So let’s talk a little bit about what you’ve done differently. I know you guys have made some changes, some things that we talked about here a little bit ago from an operational standpoint. And some of it is like a business maturity thing, right? You get to a point and you’re hustling hard and you realize that I can’t hustle any harder. So how are we gonna do this differently? So talk about what’s going on from an operation standpoint.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (02:30.303)
Yeah, Operationally we were grinding every single day I mean as every I think like early entrepreneur does regardless of your vertical and we We were making cold calls and doing all this and it got to the point where it was like Sam and I can only produce

So many millions now. So we can only produce so much money before like we just don’t have time. we’re constrained by the other needs of the business. And so I think this really like we knew it. It it dawned on us in 2023. And I think in 2024, it became we became really impressionable about.

Mike Hambright (02:54.968)
Right.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (03:09.213)
the importance of team building and hiring rights. We hired wrong a lot, and not to say that we brought on bad people or I think just as, you know.

of the business. Yeah, and as partners and as founders, we’re kind of like, all right, how do we do this? Like, what do we look for? we bring somebody great on, but they don’t have the right training, so we can’t get the optimal amount of production out of them because they didn’t have good guideposts. And I think learning, failing as a partner in the business, like failing as quickly as we can has been super helpful. And from an operational piece, I think what we’ve realized is we need to step back and stop being individual contributors.

and more focused on how do we build out the ancillary pieces of the business, know, training.

And just like everything from running comps to sales process, like how do we really dial that in so that the people coming in, not only do they feel like, this place really has it together, but they also feel empowered by the amount of information they have and they feel the liberty to be able to fail, which has really changed our business. we were seeing it. had one of our best hires, his name is Andrew. He’s no real estate experience, started four months ago and is doing five figure months.

And a lot of that has come because that’s the acquisitions role. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (04:33.068)
That’s an acquisitions role? Yeah. So was he in sale? Just kind of curious, because people always say, well, where do you hire acquisitions? So did he have a sales background of some other sort?

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (04:45.053)
He was actually selling season tickets for the Washington Nationals at one point or another. And that was a sales experience he had in regards to sales. But no real estate sales. So we found them three ways.

Mike Hambright (04:54.24)
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (05:02.975)
Andrew came to us via referral. So, and this is something that Sam and I have been doing, like get out to all of your local events. Like we try to go to two events a week where we can go out and just find people. A new hire we’d actually just brought on, we found it at an event. Andrew was a referral. Juliana came through a recruiter that utilized his network. And, you know, we…

are also reaching out to people on LinkedIn. Get the navigator subscription and every message is a custom message. But you have to treat recruiting the same way that you treat your sales funnel, right? Like for the seller. So there’s no perfect way to actually, you know, find an individual. It’s like, you know, you just have to go like anything else in real estate is, is go out hunting and see, you know, see where you find the, the, the, the perfect catch, right? Like there’s no

Mike Hambright (05:37.57)
Yeah.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (05:55.763)
that said, please, in my opinion.

Mike Hambright (05:57.698)
Yeah, it’s the same for buying houses though, right? You’ve got a lot of channels, you never know where the deal’s gonna come through, you just have to cast a wider net. It’s interesting, so you guys, would you guys say improving the, probably SOPs and processes and stuff like that has allowed you to attract better talent?

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (06:16.477)
that and pay, right? mean, obviously, or compensation and pay. it’s, you know, at one point when we first started, Mike, we were like paying out 15 % of the assignment fee to individuals that were here, but it was no salary, right? And then we started a 36 K base plus seven and a half.

pay on commissions out of the net profit. I think it depends on all, it all depends on the actual phase of your company, where you’re at in regards to being able to provide.

either pay structure plus commission and or, you know, when we first started, we were, everything was in house and we were cold calling in house. We were, you know, paying out up the wazoo. And then it’s like, we finally got to the point where we’re able to step back, hunker down, put a salary in place and then actually pay commission based on where we’re, where we’re at as a company. So that, plays a big factor.

Mike Hambright (07:20.824)
Yeah. Yeah. So you’ve got kind of a base in place. you say, and I’m harping on this because I think that’s one of the biggest problems that real estate investors have is being good at recruiting a team. We’re often good at hiring people, but we’re really good at hiring the wrong people, right? We just like, yeah, that guy could probably figure it out. Or we’re like, hey, my, my buddy’s brother needs a job and he used to sell shoes at Payless. So I think he’ll be good in acquisition. Like we just find all these reasons to be able to check the box, but not necessarily.

you know, the right people. honestly, historically, I think we, probably you guys too, I have is like, I don’t do a good job of training or setting people. I’m really kind of setting them up for failure, honestly, because I have had the mentality like, hey man, I had to figure it out. But it’s like, yeah, but it’s my business. they just want.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (08:01.555)
Yeah.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (08:08.829)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (08:10.282)
a job, right? And so you don’t really want to recruit the entrepreneurial mind. You want to recruit more of the person that wants to be a part of a team and is, you know, is happy with not having to deal with the stuff that owners have to deal with, but you have to relieve them of having to deal with those things as well, right?

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (08:27.007)
Go ahead, Sam. I think we found a good balance from a standpoint where you’re hiring an individual that does want to be an employee but has the mindset of an owner, right? And that doesn’t necessarily constitute him taking the brunt of the work that we as owners will initially take, but he does care enough to figure out.

that extra step that needs to happen to get something done. And that goes a long way, right? I mean, when you have an individual that actually has that mindset, it gives you the comfort and the confidence to say, I know in our case for our transaction coordinator, Alex will get this done. He’ll take a step above and beyond to accomplish the mission at hand, right? And

Mike Hambright (08:57.452)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (09:16.931)
Yeah.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (09:18.427)
You know, it plays well to your team building and the confidence you have as an owner to actually delegate and release the reins of transaction coordinated, you know, talking to title, talking to attorneys. It gives you the ability to focus on something else with the confidence that things are going to get done.

Mike Hambright (09:42.03)
Yeah, that’s great. And I think…

you know, the more you build out your team, if you can make it feel more like a team instead of a bunch of individual contributors that, you know, I think you guys are building out your office there. But I know one of the problems with, and I have a pretty good size virtual team too, but we, you know, from a business maturity standpoint, over the past few years, we’ve done a much better job of having town halls, pulling people together, having group like benefits, like group, like goals. If we hit this as a company, we’re going to go to Cabo, like all these things that historically

I just didn’t do because we’re just transactional thinking instead of like, look, I’m at a place now in my business where if it ain’t fun, I don’t want to do it. So I’ve got to bring people along with me that are having fun too, otherwise they don’t want to work here. There’s a lot of places you can go work.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (10:29.599)
think a lot of it too is like we.

Mike Hambright (10:34.2)
Yeah.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (10:37.855)
And at least where we’re at, and again, this may be a maturity thing, like maybe we’re not mature enough or maybe we we are mature enough. But I think a lot of the way that we’re pitching, you know, people are coming in is like, listen, we want you to be an entrepreneur. We want you to come in. We want you to think like by the time we want to be the last people that you ever have to work for. And so if we can equip you with that skillset so that you can go out in the world and go make money and do things on your own, like we’ve done our jobs, right? Like if we’re, if we’re producing people that are continuously going out and making money, then you know, we’re doing the right thing.

because that means while they’re here, like we’re both winning. They’re performing, they’re empowered. They’re like, wow, these people really want to equip me with the tools to win, which builds a loyalty into our culture, which is really great. But again, it kind of like sets back to like, this is why team building is just so mission critical is because you’re constantly going to need to be able to build the team. And those who want to stick around will stick around because like they have developed something really nice and the growth opportunities are endless because it’s like, hey, if you see an opportunity, write a job description, tell us why it’s

it’s beneficial and run with it. Mike, you mentioned something about you have a lot of virtual team members. How does that work in regards to production, holding them accountable? mean, obviously, KPIs and metrics is one big factor. But how do you keep that camaraderie of a team if everybody’s in?

Mike Hambright (11:40.59)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (12:06.828)
Yeah, I think it’s, know, there have been times where if I’m managing people that are, you know, overseas or just virtual, not here, that I would have a lot of like one-on-ones, like we’re meeting with them and we tend to do more stuff in as a team now. Like I used to like have people come to me for any little thing they need. So I’m kind of getting, if they were in my office, it was like.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (12:07.731)
ready for the board.

Mike Hambright (12:29.23)
somebody knocking on the door like, you got a second? You got a second? You got a second? It’s super inefficient for me, right? And then even online, people would just slack all day long. They’re just like sending me slack messages. I’m like, I’m getting like slack to death, you know? And so I was like, look, going forward, if it’s urgent, get ahold of me. Here’s a couple of ways to get ahold of me. But if it’s not, I’m going to have office hours meetings a couple of times a week. It’s just an open slack because…

people are here and they join from my office, they might join on Slack huddle or even virtually, they just all come in at the same time. And I’m just like, hey, let’s just, you you go, what questions do you have? And we just kind of knock out everybody’s at the same time. But yeah, think it’s, you know, I didn’t.

used to include my team in the goal setting process for my annual goals and stuff, and now I need them there because I need them to be accountable to those goals. If you just say, well, those are your goals, that’s not my goal, that’s not good. So I’m asking people now, hey, maybe here’s what I’d like to do.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (13:21.961)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (13:25.74)
Can you tell me how we get there? Are you guys on board with this? Is everybody committed to this goal and kind of get the buy-in of the whole team to kind of do those things. So probably just doing a lot more as a group instead of individual conversations with salespeople or an operations person. we just, you know, and instead of them coming to me and saying, Hey, this person’s not doing what they’re supposed to do. I’m like, look, don’t bring me any problems. You guys figure it out and work together, you know? So just things like that. think just having team-based goals, tracking the KPIs.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (13:49.311)
They

Mike Hambright (13:55.656)
for sure way better as to like what people are supposed to do and I think especially for virtual assistant types is helping that it’s really easy to give them

a set of tasks, like this is your job, this is you’re supposed to do, and then they have blinders on to like how this fits into the bigger picture, is like making sure that people understand like, this is your role and here’s how it impacts like all these other people and our business and our customers and everything, right? So it’s just making sure that everybody understands the big picture of what’s going on. So I don’t know, it’s not, I’m not perfect, but it definitely is an evolutionary process, you know?

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (14:24.767)
what’s going on.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (14:31.163)
I think none of us are perfect. mean, it’s a fail forward, learn as you go situation. Everybody makes a scene on Instagram and everywhere else in between. It’s like everything is perfect. Man, that’s one thing we can realize that nothing’s perfect. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (14:37.39)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (14:44.214)
No, it’s not. Those guys are liars. Yeah. So let’s talk about extra strategy. I you guys have evolved in this kind of down market here to do more creative finance things. And like what’s been your biggest without necessarily kind of diving into every exit strategy? Like what’s probably the biggest change or evolutionary or maybe it’s different thinking or whatever that’s kind of changed over the past couple of years.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (15:07.487)
Yeah Mike, honestly I can definitely speak for our company because I’ve consistently heard it’s a downturn, the market’s down. I I think we’ve had the best two years as a company, the last two years where I’m hearing everybody say, this has been the worst time for us. We’ve actually tried and true mailing, right? And again, check mailers, obviously you get soft offers, call. That’s been our tried and true marketing channel as far

Mike Hambright (15:20.77)
Yeah, that’s great.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (15:37.441)
as

making the company grow exponentially. When we first started the mailers, it was a lot different than us cold calling. So I think that exit strategy right there for us, or sorry, that marketing channel for us has given us the ability to step into wholesale, a wholesale exit. That’s predominantly what we exit out of these properties.

Mike Hambright (16:05.102)
Yeah.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (16:09.501)
with is the wholesale. Like we implemented novations. We understand novations very well. The Brewer method with Eric Brewer. Also, we’ve done some sub tools. exit out of properties. Sorry, we do fix and flips as well. But we do it a little bit different in regards to us not being in.

the project management or the general contractor’s role. We’ll source the deal, hand it off to another company. They will essentially take care of all materials and labor. Since we get these properties at a discount, we have the ability to split the profit after offset expenses. So that’s a bit hands off the fix and flip model that we’ve used.

Mike Hambright (16:54.926)
Mm-hmm.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (17:01.181)
Hotels also been nice. We’ve done a great job. Like generating private lenders who will come in, foot the bills, so rather than using hard money where we’re going to get nickel and dined with, you know.

points and origination fees and all this other stuff. We have a private lender come in, cost plus closing cost, then relist it. We’re actually doing that right now. And again, that helps us kind of develop a little bit of a private money market where you can have people put their money to work. You show them what you’ve done, the underwriting, how long it’s gonna take, raise it, buy it.

clean it out, relist it, and the turnaround times on that is 30 to 90 days. So again, it buys you a ton of credibility in the short term, and also allows you to line up private lenders. So when we do have bigger projects down the line, we’re gonna be able to tap them and say, hey listen, we wanna let you guys in on something that we’re working on. And it kinda creates this FOMO, like these guys gotta work on something special, I’m the first one that’s gonna get access to it.

Mike Hambright (17:59.788)
Yeah, so these are more of like, whole-tail deals you’re saying? You’re just cleaning them up and listing them? Yeah.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (18:04.541)
Yeah, taking them down.

with somebody else’s money, cleaning them out, and then relisting them on the MLS. But we also have the ability to purchase as well through Kyavi. I know they are part of the investor fuel community. we’ve actually purchased, up, and sold properties through that hard money line. And again, it all depends on where you’re at as a business and a business owner, right? Like, not everybody has the ability to use hard money

the initial start of a wholesaling company or whatever it is that they’re doing. So it’s all dependent on the maturity of your business and where you’re at with capital. mean, at the end of the day, that’s what it comes down to.

Mike Hambright (18:51.662)
That’s awesome. And how about from a marketing standpoint? I think when we first met, you guys were primarily just cold calling. And I know you just talked about mail, obviously, but you’re doing a lot more. There’s generally been a trend of people that weren’t doing, that were kind of doing more outbound marketing to more inbound. Cause one, as an owner.

it’s way easier to execute and scale, right? And two, the profits are higher and the leads are better too, right? So, but let’s talk about, you know, how you’ve changed that over the past couple of years.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (19:22.461)
Yeah, so started cold calling. was a purely outbound operation, flipped over. Once we turned the mailers on, we were able to transition to an inbound, an inbound model. And since then we went mailers. And then we shout out to a Jicken, Jicken, Josh, Nick and Josh, who kind of helped us wrap our head around the PPC space. So we started doing PPC. We’re also doing cold calling with Lama Sulead, Scott Moore, shout out Scott Moore. That’s right. I don’t know if you’ve connected with him, Mike, but.

know, solid dude, he’s super sharp and runs a tight ship out there with his cold calling companies.

And then we just started TV with the guys over at 10X. So we kind of have like a land, air, and sea approach. We’re really kind of hitting them in this little ecosystem with mailers, cold calls, TV. And then when they go to search us online, they get hit with a retargeting ad. we’ve really seen when they say all ships.

go up with rising tides, it’s something like that. But that’s what we’ve seen on our sales floors. We’ve seen a lot of people call in and say, oh, I saw you here and I had your mailer for a couple years, or hey, I looked you guys up and then I saw you guys on TV, or you guys keep sending me these mailers, I’ve probably gotten 40 of them from you, I finally decided to give you guys a call. So the key to the marketing is obviously diversification across channels, but also consistency, and we actually

just started a little AI project in the in the making right now that’s going to allow us to utilize AI to start generating leads at scale and so again super exciting something we’re kind of working on until it’s flushed out. Park it.

Mike Hambright (21:07.63)
Yeah, awesome. Awesome. So what advice would you give to guys that, like you said, there’s a broad swath of people that have struggled a lot over the past couple years. I’ve seen those. We have quite a people in Investor Fuel that are having their best years ever. What would you say has, and I have some opinions on who’s done well and who hasn’t, but maybe I’ll share that after you guys.

tell us your secrets. Like what kind of secrets do you have or what advice would you give to people that have kind of struggled about getting their ship righted and having you some of the best years of your business life not not just kind of not you know how do you not just survive but how do you thrive?

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (21:51.715)
Here, and this is my opinion, Mike, and I learned this a long time ago when I first went to an event out in Arizona. Shout out to Carlos Reyes. He made an impactful statement that stuck with me and is still with me, right? People, data, and speed. like, are, I think are…

results come from honestly Mike it’s the skip trading services that we’re using and the data that we have right we’re using IDI core and then we’re using authentic data that’s predictive that in my opinion gives us that slight edge and that’s all you need in this space right if you have that slight edge

over another company or over another individual wholesaling, that to me is obviously going to give you the results that you’re looking for. Because if you have bad data, you’re not going to get ahold of anybody. If you have data that everybody else has, then guess what? You’re fishing in the same pond that everybody else is. So in my opinion, it’s data.

and skip tracing, right? You gotta talk to people in order to, you gotta talk to the right people in order to get results.

Mike Hambright (23:05.838)
Cool. And if you guys want a little bit more of an edge, we could talk to you again about Investor Machine. Little plug.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (23:11.459)
That’s how we ended up meeting initially.

Mike Hambright (23:16.876)
Yeah, yeah. So cool guys. Well, hey, I appreciate you being on the show today. And I wish you guys all the best as you kind of get this year off the ground. Finish up your office there, build out your team. And guys, if you’re interested in contacting, learning more about Dane and Sam, we’re gonna have their contact information right down in the show notes here. But appreciate you guys spending some time with me today. Everybody, we’ll see you on the next show. Take care.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (23:21.247)
Thanks for

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (23:28.66)
Right.

Dain And Sam – Property Pals (23:39.325)
Likewise, Mike. Cheers.