Unlocking Real Estate Success: 5 Key Strategies from a Wholesaler

Dylan Silver (00:00.92)
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast by Investor Fuel. I’m your host, Dylan Silver, and today we have Prestin Sokoloski. Did I say your name right?

Prestin (00:13.897)
Sokoloski.

Dylan Silver (00:15.598)
I didn’t. I tried. I was close. But Prestin is a wholesaler with a passion for marketing. He also does fix and flipping creative finance and is a contractor. Prestin, welcome to the show.

Prestin (00:29.848)
Well, thank you. As far as the last name goes, I usually say how you think to say it, so Sokoloski, but lazier.

Dylan Silver (00:31.615)
I wanna

Dylan Silver (00:39.063)
Uh-huh.

That’s a good one. My background is Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, we were Zubersky, and then they came to Ellis Island, and for whatever reason, they changed it to Silver. I guess that was just easier. But Zubersky sounds pretty hard, so I would have loved to have that last name, but instead it’s Dylan Silver.

Prestin (01:08.291)
You’re right. Sure.

Dylan Silver (01:10.822)
Starting from the top, how did you get into real estate? Everyone sees the success, but they don’t see necessarily the journey. What was your journey like getting in?

Prestin (01:21.834)
Yeah, so the journey was, like many people, had a full-time job. That full-time job pretty much capped out at somewhere in the 80 to 100 range. And I hit that cap after going to school within about two years. And it never really felt like my place.

And so always kind of felt like I wanted a little bit more, a little bit more of a challenge. That’s why I excelled so quickly, I believe, is just because I learned quick and did my job well. So I was in the process of buying a home, really, and decided to look into the best way to buy a home. And I learned that the best way to buy a home is buy more than one, buy a few.

Dylan Silver (02:03.501)
Thank

Prestin (02:15.911)
offset your own mortgage, have your tenants pay for it really. And so that was kind of my first step into the real estate world.

Dylan Silver (02:25.368)
Yeah. And I think a lot of people when they’re thinking about this, it seems like an entirely new thing to attack. And I know me getting into it, I had.

I had no idea how to get in. I started off wholesaling. And how were you educating yourself at this point? What was the resources that you used to attack it or to even breach the subject of I’m gonna go be a real estate investor?

Prestin (02:55.135)
Sure. The world is so packed full of information right now, right? So we can ask chat GPT any question and it will give us a better answer than probably our 10 closest friends. So that being said, how I was able to educate myself was I was actually able to wear headphones all day at my job. So.

Eight hours a day, I could put podcasts in my ears and just listen away. And so that’s what I did. I accidentally pumped my brain full of real estate and that made me take action. yeah, I don’t know. It was a lot of, can, you could assume probably 40 hours a week. I don’t think that’s necessary by any means, but I just really want to change my life. And I was ready to make it happen.

Dylan Silver (03:53.047)
So what was the time? What was the time frame for you from you start listening to the real estate podcast to you do your first deal if you had to give a rough estimate?

Prestin (03:53.18)
But first you need the education.

Prestin (04:02.696)
Sure, I would say somewhere in the neighborhood of eight months to a year. Well, and it’s not just because I was ready to jump in. I was ready to buy a home. I had moved away from family, moved away from pretty much everything I had resources in. And I was renting. And when you look into buying a home and

Dylan Silver (04:08.246)
That’s pretty good.

Prestin (04:31.87)
I feel like everyone knows that renting is just basically lighting money on fire. And I had the resources to buy a home. Homes are not that expensive here in the Midwest. in comparison to the rest of the country anyway.

Dylan Silver (04:47.699)
What’s a new build going for out there?

Prestin (04:50.687)
Typically in the 400 range for something, say, 1800 square feet, 3-2.

Dylan Silver (04:57.482)
Okay, yeah. My family’s from New Jersey, so I’m comparing it to New Jersey, but in DFW, I don’t know square footage-wise, but I wanna say the median or average is around there, is around there. But certainly, if you compare it to other parts of the country, the coasts for sure, it’s a totally different scenario.

Prestin (05:00.222)
But you can buy. Sure.

Prestin (05:19.942)
Yeah, everyone talks about the Midwest market like Detroit and those things being very cheap for many reasons. And honestly, that’s why I kind of got into short term rentals as opposed to long term holds in this area is just because the properties are so most of them are over 100 years old. That’s fine and dandy.

You can get them for a very good rate and they cash flow very well. But long-term thinking, 20, 30 years, appreciation is not really there. And as far as measuring net worth, if that’s what you’re going after, then your money is better placed in other markets for sure.

Dylan Silver (06:13.041)
Yeah. After you acquired your first property, before the call you mentioned that wholesaling was something that you were doing for a while. Tell us a little bit about that, how you got into wholesaling and then the kind of deals that you were doing at the time.

Prestin (06:31.004)
Yeah, so step one was buying a house in the first place, right? So I went on the market and bought a house for myself. I felt it was a little overpriced for what it was, but that was the beginning of the whole COVID debacle. So prices were skyrocketing. And so I bought this house for a whopping $114,000. Scared I overpaid.

Dylan Silver (06:53.439)
Yeah.

Prestin (07:00.545)
scared of many things, as many new home buyers are. But also the nice part about that was it allowed me to save some money. Mortgage PITI was somewhere in the 750 range. So for a single guy living alone, that was very tolerable. And then actually getting into wholesaling, I found my first deal on Facebook Marketplace.

And it was one of them nasty little homes that nobody wants to touch. The floor is wobbly, the walls are crooked, and the roof is crooked. Yes, exactly. And that’s exactly what I was thinking as I was going to meet with the guy. But still hadn’t had my feet wet other than buying my own property. So this was scary. Walked in. The place was priced at, I believe, $35,000.

Dylan Silver (07:37.29)
Wholesale gold.

Prestin (08:00.505)
Very cheap, relatively to the rest of the country and other markets just as a total, but this place needed plenty of work. It probably needed, knowing now, didn’t know then, but knowing now it needed over $100,000 worth of rehab. So we’re walking through the house and eventually he tells me, well, I told you over the phone I would take 24. And I’m thinking to my head,

this guy must have been talking to somebody else because he never told me that. And so from listening to all these podcasts and everything, there was too many stories of people that had contracts in their car and just ended up signing a deal on the hood of their car or right on the kitchen table. And that’s exactly what they did. As soon as he said 24, I said, yep, that’s done. And I went and got a random contract that I went and found on the internet.

and signed it right there on the hood of the car. Got even more scared at that point now because I didn’t have $24,000 even then to, yeah, I couldn’t close on the house of my tribe. that pushed me to talk to a lot of people, network lot, find some buyers, and eventually I did make $4,000 on that first deal.

Dylan Silver (09:03.868)
Thank you.

Dylan Silver (09:09.37)
Do anything with it, yeah.

Dylan Silver (09:22.537)
How’d you find that buyer?

Prestin (09:26.407)
Local Facebook groups were big. I actually want to say I joined the groups and just started posting pictures of this house and the price and people started reaching out to me. Eventually one person was ready to look at it and we walked through and he said, yep, I’ll take it for whatever the math was there, 28. And so we did it.

Dylan Silver (09:52.167)
Wow. Do you remember by any chance what your option period was on this or was there an option period?

Prestin (09:59.958)
Yeah, so it was about a month. Being on Facebook Marketplace, yeah, being on Facebook Marketplace, these people had a lot of tire kickers. And I guess I sold myself pretty well because they signed. But other than the case, there was a lot more work to start with there. I had a contract, but now I don’t even know if a title company will take a wholesale, right? So I…

Dylan Silver (10:02.139)
Okay, you had 30 days. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (10:13.406)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (10:25.063)
Right, yeah, it’s hard.

Prestin (10:27.226)
I called every title company in the area within about 30 miles. called every title company and finally found one that they’re like, yeah, we’ve done this before and we can do it with you. And that’s the same title company I work with for everything today.

Dylan Silver (10:44.793)
Amen. That is awesome. That is awesome. I one of the I’m going to be a real estate agent here soon. God willing. I’m sitting for my exam in the 31st. But one of the questions that I had was, man, it’s hard to find the title companies, you know, and agents who do who do creative deals. And in a way, it’s because they’re not set up to do that. Yeah, the title companies are owned by attorneys. But in many cases, nothing against title companies. The people

at the title company might have no idea what is going on in an assignment of contract or a creative deal and it could seem scary even to them. So a lot of them are just arms length, we’re not gonna touch it. And so when you find that good title company, especially as a wholesaler, as anyone doing creative, it’s like a diamond that you just found, it’s a needle in a haystack.

Prestin (11:38.49)
Absolutely. You got to think it’s their job on the line as well. So if they sign something they’re not supposed to, they may might be out the job. And not only that, but if they lose their job because of a certain document, they’re not getting another job with another title company by any means. So yeah, absolutely. But yeah, I think definitely just taking the time to set aside and build at least one good relationship with the title company.

Dylan Silver (11:54.247)
Now they know about it.

Prestin (12:07.987)
has served me in big ways. We learn together on how to make these creative deals flow.

Dylan Silver (12:15.324)
From there, you got into marketing pretty heavily with the paper mailers. Or were you doing this kind of at the same time? It doesn’t sound like it. It sounds like you had that deal and then you realize, I’ve got something here, a proof of concept. Let me put more into this. Is that about right?

Prestin (12:31.572)
Yeah, exactly. being still early into it, wanted to make use of that $4,000, make it go as far as I possibly could, right? So I guess not knowing much about the industry just from what I learned through podcasts and everything started into Facebook ads and Facebook ads did not convert whatsoever. I think I spent

at least $1,000 just trying out and I don’t even think I got one single lead out of it. From there did some, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with EDDM.

Dylan Silver (13:15.654)
No.

Prestin (13:17.022)
So EDDM is every door direct mail. So you pick a mail route on the USPS website and you’ll go design these postcards. I’m sure you’ve seen them in your mail before, but just a postcard promotion. And you bring a whole staff of them to the local post office and they deliver them to the mail route.

also turned out to be a waste of money for me. So yeah.

Dylan Silver (13:49.317)
Really? But that didn’t make you give up on direct mail.

Prestin (13:55.661)
Well, I had proof of concept. I knew it could be done. And I knew there was plenty of properties around here that could be sold. I had at this point already talked to plenty of the investors in the market. And nobody was doing any sort of marketing to pick up these deals outside of, you know, their own personal network. So I knew there had to be a route.

to get a hold of these people and get my hands on deals that nobody else had opportunities. And so throughout that,

I started writing, another one of my tests was basically handwriting letters. So I wrote a letter out, left the name blank, left the address blank. And I want to say I printed off in my home office about a thousand sheets of paper and wrote people’s names a thousand times and addresses a thousand times, put them all in envelopes myself.

Dylan Silver (14:43.429)
Hmm.

Prestin (15:04.059)
sent them out and I don’t remember the exact details. This is a few years ago now for sure, but I got a couple deals out of that and yeah.

Dylan Silver (15:13.432)
Wow, handwritten letters, thousand handwritten letters. Did anybody specifically say I responded to you because of the handwritten letter?

Prestin (15:22.84)
Not necessarily, but come to find out a little bit later, economies of scale, right? So once I started doing a little bit more, the handwritten letters were not feasible for me. Not only, exactly. And I was still working a day job. So I had eight hours of my day consumed with that. I had to try to schedule.

Dylan Silver (15:24.39)
huh.

Dylan Silver (15:35.313)
The way to go, yeah, there’s a lot of writing. You’re gonna get carpal tunnel over there, Prestin.

Prestin (15:49.167)
Write contracts and close deals all at the same time and then mark it as well. So not really feasible. Come to find out those handwritten letters were the best response rate out of anything I’ve done still to this day.

by partnering up with companies like, what is it, Open Letter Marketing, where it writes out a handwritten type letter. It looks handwritten. I want to say they actually do it with real pens and ink and robots. Those performed almost just as well.

Dylan Silver (16:16.976)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (16:28.102)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (16:32.302)
What’s the name of the company? I gotta look at it.

Prestin (16:34.869)
Open letter marketing.

Dylan Silver (16:36.706)
Open, I gotta look at this, what a find. Wow.

Prestin (16:39.618)
Yeah, absolutely.

Dylan Silver (16:42.916)
And so with Open Letter Market, do you still use them?

Prestin (16:46.846)
Yes, I definitely do. think the more strategic way of going about it, I don’t think the letter matters as much as who you’re sending it to. That was a two-part process, right? Coming up with a message that actually made people call me and also finding the people to send the message to that would also be enticed to call me.

Dylan Silver (16:58.201)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (17:15.97)
Yeah.

Prestin (17:16.236)
So coming up with those lists, there was plenty that worked great. There was plenty that didn’t work great. Going on places like list source and just trying different things, trying, ordering different lists of different people, different demographics, houses that were different. You you could filter it by number of units, square footage,

a lot of things. The possibilities are endless there. But we found a couple good lists that worked out very well. Kind of going back to the handwritten letter part, it seems that the route that was the most work was always the most profitable. So we had a list that we put together. I actually paid a

Dylan Silver (18:03.941)
Mmm.

Prestin (18:12.746)
I would say friend. I hate to say kid because I feel like many people would classify me as a kid still, but, I paid him. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we paid him to drive around town pretty much street by street in every neighborhood that we thought was worth it to send mail to you. Cause we had done.

Dylan Silver (18:22.277)
You’ve got deeds in your name. Once you’ve got deeds in your name, it’s a game changer. I’m your grandfather now, son. You know what I mean?

Prestin (18:42.219)
deals in before and make a list of all these places that were a little bit dilapidated or older windows or older roof, whatever the case may be. And from there, that list, I want to say we marketed for six months straight, just because I think the first time we mailed that list, we got somewhere in the neighborhood of five deals off of a 800 person list.

Dylan Silver (18:43.877)
Yeah.

Prestin (19:12.01)
Or address list close five deals. So that’s not even considering, you know, deal funnel what we decided to take out of it. Right. So we mailed that until we absolutely didn’t get any more deals. And that was.

Dylan Silver (19:12.344)
Wow.

Dylan Silver (19:26.883)
So you had five out of eight hundred so that’s like that’s like more than a if I’m doing my math right more than a five percent No, no, it’s not five percent. It’d be What is that? one out of every

Prestin (19:40.697)
It’d be something like 0.1%, 0.2%.

Dylan Silver (19:45.078)
Okay, my math was a little off there, but still it’s good returns.

Prestin (19:49.584)
Yeah, so a lot of people talk about response rate, but nobody talks about close rate, which is all that really matters, right? If your response rate is 2 % in the direct mail game, you’re doing very well. And if I try to reverse engineer the numbers here, say we got five deals off of that, we probably got about 50 calls, because we would close maybe

Dylan Silver (19:56.214)
Matters, yeah.

Prestin (20:17.288)
one of every 10 calls we had or genuine calls, not discovery, but actual genuine calls and pricing about their home. So yeah, that puts us at, I don’t know, gotta be somewhere in that 2 % range. Quick math isn’t my thing. That’s why I use calculators.

Dylan Silver (20:27.788)
Wow.

Dylan Silver (20:34.893)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (20:41.1)
It’s okay, they’re never wrong, you know, they’re never wrong. So that takes us to today. You mentioned before we hopped on the creative space which you’re in with notes and I don’t want to try to even attempt to explain what’s going on there because it’s really a pretty creative deal that you’ve got going on. Talk a little bit about that.

Prestin (20:43.526)
Yeah, exactly.

Prestin (21:06.311)
Sure, so I was listening to a lot of podcasts and I feel like a lot of people do around no and low money down getting into real estate. And the first property I bought, my primary home, my first primary home, I put $14,000 in at closing and that was the most money I put into a deal for the next probably 30.

So it was a conglomerate of lot of things. But what worked out best for us was really just coming in with three different pricing options for all these homeowners. And this was all off market, so we didn’t have to deal with realtors telling us that it wasn’t possible, because they will do that. So we would come in at our lowest price typically with a cash offer.

Our second price tier would be a higher price or more money to the seller, right? But we would structure it in the sense of we could get bank loans for 80 % of value, 80 % of as is value. We would ask the seller that in order to get this purchase price, we’re gonna need you to hold the 20 % on a note. A lot of times that was one year.

Dylan Silver (22:32.29)
Thank

Prestin (22:34.351)
Sometimes if they didn’t care as much, we would draw it out over three years per se. What that does for the seller is it gives them a higher purchase price and can also lower their tax liability depending if they’re a landlord or that was their primary residence. So sometimes it’s advantageous. We just kind of felt out the person. And then the highest return for them

Dylan Silver (22:52.829)
their practice.

Thank you.

So.

Prestin (23:03.0)
was they would carry the entire purchase price of the property for anywhere from one to three years, just long enough so that we could get in, rehab the property, and then refinance it. And then they would get all their money out. And we would basically burr it at that point. So we come in zero down, and we’d remodel it, get a rehab, pay out the seller at that point, couple.

one, two years down the line, and then likely we would come out of closing with cash in our pocket at that refinance.

Dylan Silver (23:35.65)
Wow. Before we hopped on, was talking to you about how a lot of people are, there’s mixed opinions, but a lot of people are moving out of fix and flipping because they’ve had some tough losses and the margins are slimmer, especially if you don’t price it right out the gate. And moving into creative note buying. I just spoke with a gentleman who was doing second position.

notes and liens and buying those. So he buys the distressed second liens. And hearing your story in that space as well is further testament to agility. You to our listeners, you have to be able to adapt. And your story going from, you know, humble beginnings as a diesel mechanic to now fixing and flipping creative finance

and the strategy that you talked about with the notes, it requires you to be constantly able to do something new. And just because your strategy works right now, it might not work in five years from now. It might not work, know, something could happen a year from now that could change everything like what happened with COVID. And a lot of people that wipes them out because they’re not able to adapt. you know, I’m gonna, God willing,

Prestin (24:57.281)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (25:01.525)
be a realtor here once I pass my exam, end of the March. there’s a statistic, know, most people in any profession, but especially realtors, won’t sell a home after two years. And they may not sell one in that time period. And I talk about it and I was joking, but half seriously before we hopped on that, you know, people who are going to real estate school and working for

title companies might not really know or feel comfortable with a lot of these creative deals. But once you educate yourself and you do what I call the fanatical networking and being a networking junkie and finding the title companies, finding, if you’re working with realtors, the realtors who do creative deals, finding other people to JV on and finding the buyer like you found your buyer on your first deal, then you can continue to

to survive, even if it’s just by the skin of your teeth. You can continue to survive and that’s how you survive the downturns. And some people, some people, it sounds like yourself, are not just able to survive in the downturns, they’re able to flourish because they find a niche that where everyone else isn’t operating in that space, they are. And in your case, you’re even growing your contracting business at the same time.

Prestin (26:25.794)
Absolutely. I feel like there’s the real estate market moves up and down as always. Buying in say 2019, you could probably turn around. For example, I bought a home just down the street from my house. Actually, these people were looking at getting out and moving out to the country. So they needed to close quick.

and that was my name of the game, right? So I this place for right around $100,000 and it was later in the fall and in the winter, it’s kind of rule of thumb up here that you don’t want to sign a tenant in the winter and I found out that winter exactly why people say that. Good tenants do not move in the winter. Let me just…

Dylan Silver (27:05.226)
you

Dylan Silver (27:18.975)
Thank

Prestin (27:22.538)
Say that.

Dylan Silver (27:25.283)
If you’re in the Midwest listening to this, is specific, area specific.

Prestin (27:31.139)
Absolutely. So about six months of battling, very interesting stories. I won’t get into detail because they’re a little bit personal in the sense of those tenants likely. But there was some weird things going on. So we ended up kicking them out. But the light at the end of the tunnel was this was more real estate timing or market timing than anything. But I was able to turn around and sell that property for $2.30.

Dylan Silver (27:42.237)
Yeah.

Prestin (28:00.287)
within six months just because of the headache. I met with a realtor. I knew it was worth a lot more than I had into it, but I met with a realtor and they said, well, we should be able to list it somewhere around 2.30 and we receive an offer the next week. So we went ahead and took that.

Dylan Silver (28:02.291)
Wow.

Dylan Silver (28:09.139)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (28:20.543)
Wow. current day, contracting, some fixing and flipping, creative deals, notes. Where is your attention majority or does it differ depending on the week and the month?

Prestin (28:40.081)
Yeah, so as far as my personal investing currently, the long-term gameplay for me is just own a bunch of really good real estate. The Midwest doesn’t really fit my criteria as far as really good real estate. I have some short-term rentals around here that are just in great spots. Pretty much over the course of the years, I believe that they will be

appreciating. So going more into short-term rentals, automating the system and that to where as it takes me maybe a couple hours a month on the short-term side of things. There’s a lot of good softwares out there like hospitable that pretty much automate all of your client contact. You only jump in when specific questions are asked. Automates to cleaners, things like that.

Dylan Silver (29:25.002)
Thank you.

Prestin (29:36.955)
Majority of my time is actually spent marketing for our contracting company and building that business out. wanted something, you know, to invest in real estate at a high level, you need a high income. And I feel like a lot of people are just looking for cash flow. You hop into real estate with low money to your name, not much for income.

Dylan Silver (29:52.074)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (29:58.121)
in

Prestin (30:04.96)
And I feel like it hurts a lot of people more than it helps because they still don’t have their budgets figured out in their day to day personal life. Absolutely. So the contracting company was just more of a way that I could build some equity in something and level the cash flow in my life as a whole so that I can make real estate investing more of a casual thing buying places that I wanted.

Dylan Silver (30:06.003)
you like a person.

Dylan Silver (30:13.993)
Yep, asset management.

Prestin (30:34.82)
to keep forever rather than places that had equity in them. Because that’s what I found myself doing. If I had equity, I would close on it. And that wasn’t that great of a tactic.

Dylan Silver (30:44.674)
Last, we’re coming up on time here. So last question. If you had, because I know you mentioned it, Millie, the Midwest isn’t probably long term your ideal avatar for where you want to be buying real estate. Where is, where’s the place that you say, you know what, this is where I want to have my portfolio. Where’s the prime real estate for you?

Prestin (31:08.962)
Sure. I feel like Florida is a very good opportunity right now. I still want to do a little bit more research in the market, but there’s insurance companies that are pulling out or lifting premiums to insane rates right now. So you can buy a home and with a pool in a very nice city in Florida right now for about the same thing you can pay in the Midwest. That is very specific to right now. I would

assume and hope but we are looking into buying some things down in Florida. Phoenix is very interesting just because it’s continued to grow. I feel like we’ve missed the bus there but if we keep it off market we should be able to lock up some stuff with a good amount of equity.

Dylan Silver (31:48.581)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (31:56.415)
I’m with you on Florida. love Florida. really, really do. Prestin, where can folks go to get a hold of you?

Prestin (32:04.566)
Sure, so I’m not huge on social media thus far. I’m to definitely grow a following. So if people want to reach out, they can find me. You know what? Check the show notes and we’ll have my handles in there. Yeah, otherwise, I’ll tell you what. We’ll throw my cell phone number in there as well. And then people, if they have some questions.

Dylan Silver (32:23.335)
We’ll get it in there. We’ll get it in there. Bye. Bye then. Go ahead.

Dylan Silver (32:31.911)
Okay.

Prestin (32:33.888)
Feel free to reach out, love to help, love to share stories and see smiles on other people’s faces.

Dylan Silver (32:41.266)
That’s exactly right. know, one of our missions here, specifically at our investor fuel mastermind, which is what this podcast was brought out by, is to connect the major leagues of real estate investors from coast to coast, people who are doing 50 plus deals to 100 plus deals a year, and then folks who might just be starting out to get them in the room together to collaborate. So if you’re in the Midwest and you’re listening to this, know that

You’ve got someone there who’s who’s probably seen what you’ve seen a couple of times in Prestin and looking to expand. So you never know what the future holds. But that wraps up this episode of the Real Estate Pose podcast. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. Until next time. Thank you very much.

Prestin (33:27.358)
Thank you.