Buying Houses in Bulk: Resell 100, Keep 17 Free and Clear

Buying houses in bulk looks impossible because the price tag is one big number and nobody actually wants 117 houses. The way out is arithmetic: put the whole package under contract, divide the purchase price by ten, sell ten-house blocks at that number to other investors, and keep whatever is left over free and clear.

That is exactly what Judy Cook did on a Houston package she called the Whitney Project. She sold 100 houses for the full purchase price of all 117 and kept 17 with no debt against them — the only capital she put in was a presentation at a Denny’s.

Below: how the math has to pencil before you sign, how to pre-sell blocks before closing, how to fund the piece you keep when you have no cash, and how to sequence rehabs across a portfolio so the first sales pay for the rest.

From the Real Estate Pros Show

This article draws on an interview with Judy Cook of Pathway to Wealth on the Real Estate Pros Show, hosted by Scott Bursey.

The Bulk Math: Why 117 Houses Can Cost You Nothing

Cook found a package of 117 foreclosed houses on Cross Timbers in Houston — small houses, small lots, possibly Section 8 at one point, all in varying states of disrepair. She looked at the asking price and concluded the houses had to be worth more than that in aggregate. That judgment is the entire deal. Everything after it is division.

She did not want 117 houses. So she took the full package price, divided it by ten, and made that the price of a ten-house block. Ten blocks sold at that price returns the entire purchase price. One hundred houses go to other investors. Seventeen stay with her, with nothing owed on them.

She put the package under contract and held it in an LLC. The entity isn’t mandatory, but it keeps the assignment and resale mechanics clean when you are splitting one contract across ten buyers.

The retained houses are the profit. You are not making a spread on the hundred you sell — you are selling those at cost, deliberately, because that is what makes them easy to move. The margin is entirely in the remainder.

Which means the whole structure hinges on one test: is the package price meaningfully below what the individual houses are worth to an investor buyer? If a ten-house block at your price is not an obvious deal for the person across the table, you have no buyers and no remainder. Run the block price against local investor comps before you sign, not after.

Cook’s framing on it was simple: how many times do you get 17 free and clear houses for nothing other than putting a meeting together?

Pre-Selling the Package Before You Have to Close

Control first, then sell. Cook had the 117 houses under contract before she had a single buyer. That order matters — you cannot pre-sell blocks you do not control, and you will not raise ten buyers for a package somebody else can still take out from under you.

With the contract in hand, she invited roughly 20 of her best students to a Denny’s and presented one offer: ten houses for this price. Nine bought that night. She went home one block short. The next morning a man called, said he had talked to his wife, and took the tenth block if it was still available.

Twenty people in a diner filled a 117-house portfolio in under 24 hours. That only happens if you already have the list. Cook ran Pathway to Wealth and was president of the Realty Investment Club of Houston — her buyer pool was built years before the Whitney Project showed up. If you are going to attempt bulk, build the investor relationships now, in your local club or association, so the room exists when the package does.

The legal mechanism is the assignment. Cook’s advice for any contract you may not want to close on yourself: write “and/or assigns” after your name as buyer. That lets you sell the contract to whoever will buy it instead of taking title and reselling the house. On a bulk package, it means you can transfer blocks to your ten buyers as part of the same closing rather than funding 117 houses and then flipping 100 of them.

I didn’t want 117 houses. So I took the price tag, divided it by 10, and that was how much I sold 10 houses for. I sold 100 houses for the full price of 117. How many times do you get 17 free and clear houses for nothing other than putting a meeting together?

— Judy Cook, Pathway to Wealth

Funding the Piece You Keep When You Don’t Have the Cash

If you cannot pre-sell enough to cover the price, trade equity for the capital. Cook bought a Montana ranch she could not afford outright — a rancher whose cattle were cut off from his far field after a freeway expansion needed to sell one parcel to buy another. The previous buyer had walked because the county commissioners said 20-acre tracts, but Cook read the recorded deed and it said five-acre tracts. She called the commissioners from her realtor’s office; they conceded the deed governed. She bought at the price the other buyer had abandoned.

To fund it, she approached six people. The sixth said yes. The structure: he financed the purchase in exchange for half the lots. She kept the other half with nothing owed on them. Her partner got paid well, she got free and clear land, and no bank was involved.

On where that money sits, Cook’s list is short and unglamorous: your boss, your boss’s boss, the owner of the company you work for, your next-door neighbor, and people holding self-directed IRA funds that are earning very little parked where they are. Her point about IRA holders is that they often want to lend and don’t know who to lend to — being visible in your market is most of the work.

Local collateral helps. If the lender lives near the property, they can drive by, see the deal for themselves, and in Cook’s experience may fund the purchase and sometimes the repairs. These are her arrangements, not a recommended template — run any equity-for-capital structure past your own attorney and tax advisor before you paper it.

Triaging a Portfolio: Sorting Houses Into A, B, and C

Fix the cheapest houses first. Across the Whitney Project’s 117 houses, most were basically sound but needed something — exterior paint, a broken window, deferred maintenance from sitting through foreclosure. Cook walked the portfolio and sorted every house into three repair tiers: A, B, and C.

She then coached each of the ten buyers to start with their A’s. The logic is cash flow, not condition. A’s need the least money and go to market fastest, so they convert to proceeds first, and those proceeds pay for the B’s. The B’s then pay for the C’s. Nobody has to find outside capital in the middle of a ten-house rehab.

Run it the other way and you are in trouble quickly. If a buyer starts with the heaviest rehabs, the capital goes out early, nothing is listed, nothing closes, and the holding costs on the other nine houses keep running against an empty account. That is how investors who bought good blocks still lose on them.

Do the triage before you sell blocks, not after. Three practical reasons:

• You can mix tiers so no buyer gets a block of ten C’s and stalls.
• You can price and present blocks honestly, which is what gets you repeat buyers on the next package.
• You know the aggregate repair exposure before you commit to the contract.

Cook described the A-first sequencing as the tweak that turned the project around. Cross Timbers is a nice little subdivision now — a hundred investor-owned houses getting repaired in roughly the same window changes a street fast.

Crews, Materials, and the Contractor Who Says Yes to Your Method

Buy the materials yourself. Cook ran three crews of five men at one point. Each crew gave her a materials list, she bought everything at Home Depot with a 10% discount, and delivered each list to its crew. The crews billed labor only. No supply runs, no marked-up materials, no half a day lost with five men sitting idle while one drives to the store.

She notes that Home Depot extends discounts to members of some investor associations — one more reason the club membership pays for itself before you ever find a deal there.

On contractors, interview until someone agrees to do it your way. Rewiring her first church conversion in Ronan, Montana, the first five electricians all wanted to tear out every sheet of drywall to run the new wire. Cook refused — that is a gut job masquerading as an electrical job. The sixth electrician said he would cut four-inch access holes, run the wire, and let the drywall crew patch, tape, and paint behind him. She hired him on the spot.

Note the pattern in both the Montana funding and the Montana electrician: the sixth person said yes. Five no’s is not a market verdict, it is a sample size.

Then stop re-sourcing. When Cook bought the second church on the Flathead Reservation, she hired the same crew. You vet a contractor once and then keep handing him work — the search cost is paid, the method is already agreed, and the quality is known. On a portfolio where you may be turning twenty houses, that compounds faster than any discount you will negotiate.

Reading the Problem Instead of the Property Type

Cook’s filter is not a property type, it’s two questions: can you afford it, and can you solve the problem? Everything she bought that other investors walked past failed somebody else’s category test, not a value test.

The estate house full of furniture. The owner died with no heirs and no will, the bank ended up with it, and it was packed — bedrooms of furniture, closets of clothing, a full kitchen, a full garage. Cook and her son priced the clear-out by the room: $25 a bedroom, $35 the garage, and you take everything in the room, not just what you want. Women came, looked, went home for their trucks. She hired a teenager to help load, paid him out of the proceeds, and had an empty house.

The churches. Two on the Flathead Reservation — one foreclosed to a bank, one where the congregation approached her directly and accepted her number without committee review. She did not buy churches. She bought buildings that converted to apartments.

The burned house. The lot had been cleared after a fire, but the foundation was sound, the garage stood, there was a mature tree out back, and it was a good neighborhood. Her contractor asked for blueprints. She sent him to look at the same floor plan in a nearby subdivision, mirrored — garage on the other side. The banker sold it cheap because it read as a loss.

The common thread: read the documents, read the physical remains, and price the fix. The ranch deal turned on nothing more than Cook reading the recorded deed when everyone else took the commissioners’ word.

Frequently asked questions

How do you price the blocks when you resell a bulk package of houses?

Divide the total contract price by the number of blocks you intend to sell, and set every block at that number. Cook divided a 117-house package price by ten and sold ten-house blocks at the result — ten blocks returned the full purchase price and the remaining 17 houses were hers with no debt on them.

Before you commit, check that the block price is an obvious deal to an investor buying ten houses at once. If it isn’t, you won’t fill all ten blocks and the structure collapses.

What happens if you can’t find enough buyers before your contract closes?

You either fund the shortfall yourself, bring in a capital partner, or fail to close. Cook left her Denny’s presentation with nine of ten blocks sold and the tenth buyer called the next morning — but a shortfall is a real risk and it is why you want a contract with enough time in it and clear assignment language.

The fallback Cook used elsewhere is trading equity for capital: on her Montana ranch she gave a financier half the lots in exchange for funding the purchase, keeping the other half free and clear. Applied to a bulk package, that means giving a partner a share of the retained houses rather than losing the contract.

How do you find private money for a bulk deal when you have no cash of your own?

Start with people who already know you and already have capital sitting idle — Cook names your boss, your boss’s boss, the owner of the company you work for, and your next-door neighbor. She also points to holders of self-directed IRA funds, who often want to lend and simply don’t know who to lend to.

Local collateral is persuasive. A lender who can drive past the property and see the condition for themselves will get comfortable faster, and in Cook’s experience may fund the purchase and sometimes repairs. Have a licensed attorney paper any arrangement before money moves.

Which houses in a distressed portfolio should you rehab first?

The lightest ones. Sort every house into A, B, and C repair tiers, then fix all the A’s first. They cost the least, finish the fastest, and sell soonest, which puts cash back in the account to pay for the B’s and C’s.

Cook gave her Whitney Project buyers exactly this instruction and credits it with turning the subdivision around. The alternative — starting with the heaviest rehabs — drains capital early while nine other houses accrue holding costs with nothing listed.

Is it worth buying non-residential buildings like churches or old gas stations as an investor?

Yes, if you can name the end use before you buy. Cook bought two churches on the Flathead Reservation cheap, one from a bank after foreclosure, and converted both to apartments. She was explicit that she wasn’t buying a church — she was buying a building she could turn into apartments.

Her other example is an old gas station that could become a donut shop, with the operator lined up in advance as a buyer, a tenant, or a lease-option tenant you move into bank financing after 12 months. Most investors only look at fixer-upper houses, which is precisely why those buildings sit.

The bottom line

If a bulk package crosses your desk, do two things before you think about the money: price a ten-house block against local investor comps to confirm the package is genuinely below aggregate value, and count how many buyers you could actually get into a room next week. If both answers hold, the contract is the easy part.