How Her First House Flip Launched a 35-Year Real Estate Career

Dwan Bent-Twyford (00:00)
I’m so rich. I’m so rich. I just made as much as my parents make in a year on this house. So then I bought another one and lived in it and I kept moving until Ayla got into kindergarten. Then I stayed put. Then I discovered wholesaling. I could buy it from the homeowner and sell it to these other rehabbers that I now knew. I was like, I don’t have to live in these dirty houses and fix them up. I’m gonna wholesale. And I wholesaled almost 2,000 houses.

Quentin Edmonds (01:59)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds, and I have a treat today. I am so excited about my guests. We’ve been talking, and I think this is just gonna be just one of them just.

Very easy, just very seamless kind of podcasts. And I’m excited. I’m excited. This this lady’s been investing for years. I’ll I’ll let her tell you how many years, but she’s been investing, she’s not no novice to this. And guess what, y’all? Right now, she’s in the process of rehabbing a town. Yes, you heard me right. Rehabbing a town. She loves educating people, loves helping people get started in their homes. And I’m just so excited. Listen.

28 doors. Like I said, she she is no novice to this. And so I’m so excited to introduce you all to Miss Dwan Bent-Twyford. There we go.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (02:58)
Awesome today. How are you, Mr. Quentin?

Quentin Edmonds (03:01)
I am doing good. I’m doing good. I’m I’m I’m so glad you’re here. And listen, I am the type I like to dive right in, right? I would love for you to tell the people what’s your main focus these days. And if you don’t mind, give us a little bit of an origin story, kind of how you got to the space where you’re at. And so, my dear, you have the floor, ma’am.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (03:10)
Saves good time.

All right. Well, thank you. So I’ll start a little bit with my because my origin story is honestly, it it couldn’t be more more well written. Because it’s all true. So I was legitimately fired from Denny’s. I used to work third shift, ten at night till six in the morning, and I remember getting fired from Denny’s at like three forty-five in the morning and just looking back at that big yellow sign and thinking like

Where do you go after you’ve been fired from Denny’s? Like, where do you go? And then I was married and I had a baby. And when my daughter was eight months old, my husband and I split up pretty unexpectedly. And he took the car and the money and I had a baby and I didn’t have a job. And it was so I have an eight month old child and I’m going through divorce. I have for real, like seventy five bucks in my purse.

And it was a real like come to Jesus moment about what am I gonna do? ‘Cause I was thirty. So I was for so for my age, I’m sixty seven right now. So for like my age group, people had kids in their early twenties, got out of high school, everybody got married and had kids. So for me having a daughter at thirty, it was considered like older. Even though like all the millennials now have their babies when they’re like thirty five, forty, forty five. So, you know.

All my friends have like 10-year-old kids, I had a baby. And I was like, man, I I don’t want to raise her in daycare. I really waited till I was older because I wanted to be the homeroom mom, the Girl Scout cookie mom, the field trip mom. And I really wanted to raise my daughter and do those things and not put her in daycare. And then like everything fell apart. So I’m like, well, okay, I’m 30 years old. So I can either

figure out a way to work for myself and have her with me or make my own hours. Or I can get a job. But if I get a job, I’ll probably have it till I’m 50 because she’s eight months old. Now when you’re 30, you still think 50 year old women are old. But then you get to be 67 and you’re like, you know, 75 doesn’t look that bad actually. Your mind changes.

So then I thought, well, I never worked for myself. I don’t really know what to do. I I did not know what to do. So this is like 1990. And so we had to, so for all of you youngins, we had this thing called a newspaper. And in the newspaper was this section called the classified section. And in the classified section was all of the jobs.

So I thought all these things, work for yourself, work for yourself, work for yourself. And I started going to all these meetings and they were mostly multi-level and stuff like that. And I was like, okay, I can certainly see the value, but like I need to make money right now. So as it turned out, I met a couple of guys and they said we buy houses and we fix them up and we sell them. And we buy cars and we fix them up and we sell them. It’s like, I know nothing about cars. I’m like, okay, the house thing sounds interesting. Tell me about that.

So literally we had a couple of lunches. They’re like, well, we go to the courthouse. So I’m in Palm Beach County, Florida. They go to the courthouse, you write down all the foreclosures, use those big map books, you map it all out, you go knock on the doors of the people in foreclosure, tell them that you’d like to buy their house, and then you fix it up and then you sell it. So in my mind, I thought, Okay, so I’m gonna become a decorator and I love to decorate. I have good taste. This will be super fun and how hard could this be? Yeah.

Quentin Edmonds (07:46)
Yeah.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (07:57)
So let me just tell you, decorating and rehabbing are not the same thing because the house had to be rehabbed. And I’m I moved into it with my daughter, painted the walls, put in carpet, made some blinds, and then I was like, wow, the house life needs so much work. And then I realized decorating and rehab. So I went to Home Depot. I took at that time they did live classes almost every day. And I went in and like took a class on how to lay tile.

And then I gave them the measurements, took all the stuff and tiled the kitchen. Tiled the bathrooms. And I learned how to put in toilets. And at night when Ayla was sleeping, I was building cabinets and I was making screens for the windows. I lived in this house and I rehabbed this house ninety nine percent by myself. And I sold it. I made twenty two thousand dollars in nineteen ninety. That was really a gob of money. And that was like so much money. I was like, God, I’m rich.

Quentin Edmonds (08:29)
Yeah, no.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (08:54)
I’m so rich. I’m so rich. I just made as much as my parents make in a year on this house. So then I bought another one and lived in it and I kept moving until Ayla got into kindergarten. Then I stayed put. Then I discovered wholesaling. I could buy it from the homeowner and sell it to these other rehabbers that I now knew. I was like, I don’t have to live in these dirty houses and fix them up. I’m gonna wholesale. And I wholesaled almost 2,000 houses.

I became a maniac. I wholesaled so many houses. I lost my mind because it was so easy. Then I started doing short sales, and I actually have the registered trademark on the term short sales as it applies to real estate investing. So I began and started the short sale part of the real estate investing industry back in the early ’90s. Love it. So I’m the queen of short sales. And

Quentin Edmonds (09:27)
Yeah.

Probably.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (10:24)
I don’t know. At that point, I was just like, gosh, if a broke single mom fired from Denny’s can make money, everybody can do it. So I started a REIA group. I have no experience in it. Everything I do, I’m trying it for the first time. Me and my friends start a REIA group and we start having people come and saying, hey, listen, you know, we did this and this and this and you guys can do this and let us teach you how. And next thing you know, we were teaching and rehabbing and, you know, doing all of it.

Quentin Edmonds (10:38)
Yeah.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (10:53)
And then a publishing company called me and asked me to write a book on short sales because short sales were blowing up in the ’90s and everyone that learned them learned them from me. I wrote the actual first short sale program for real estate investors. So I wrote a book called Short Sale Pre-Foreclosure Investing, which is available on Amazon. And I wrote a second book because that one did really well, but How to Sell Your House When It’s Worth Less Than the Mortgage.

Also on Amazon, and that book was written to help homeowners in distress. Like how do homeowners get rid of their house when they owe, you know, more than what it’s worth, basically. So I wrote those two books. And then a few years after that, I wrote books with Steve Forbes called Successonomics. Mm-hmm. So it just all kept rolling into the next thing. And then next thing you know, I was teaching everywhere and having infomercials and like it all just blew up into a big thing.

Quentin Edmonds (11:24)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (11:50)
But what I like right now and what I’ve always liked from day one is honestly taking people that would like to invest and become real estate investors and teaching them how and doing it the right way, making no mistakes, like really mentoring them, looking over each deal, guiding them all the way through all the steps so they can have, well, whatever they want. Financial freedom. They can, you know, I have friends that do deals and then they run

the artist on the side or, you know, just do whatever you want. Just real estate your income. And then over the years, with me and Bill being married and having three kids, you know, between us, and now we have five grandkids, we start focusing really hard on generational wealth. So I was starting buying all those buildings in Iowa because now we have things we can leave to the grandkids and maybe the grandkids and down the line and maybe, you know, and build some generational wealth.

Quentin Edmonds (12:48)
Yeah.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (12:48)
We’re

the first two people like my family’s from Ohio, he’s from Iowa, we’re the first two people on either side of our families to ever become millionaires. The first two out of everybody. So I’m like, Okay, so we’re together, so now we gotta keep this going and someone’s gotta be first. So let’s just teach it on down.

Quentin Edmonds (13:02)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Love it. Love it. Thank you for taking me through the journey. Wow. I appreciate it. Now now listen, destiny has no wasted moments, right? Destiny has no wasted moments. We are building momentum to the people that we are now, and we’re borrowing from each leg of the journey. So throughout your journey, what has the moments taught you about yourself? Has it taught you discipline, resilience? Has it changed your outlook on innovation? What has the moments taught you about you?

Dwan Bent-Twyford (13:35)
Well, I think when I think about when I first started, that I think something that was in my favor is that I was so naive, I didn’t realize what I was doing. Wow. Like if I had known I was gonna have to rehab a house and tear out kitchens and cabinets and and do knockdown and and work on the roof, I would have been like, I can’t do any of those things. I think if I had understood what I was doing, I might have been afraid to do it.

Because when I did my second house, I was more afraid of the second house because I knew what the first house was. But then there for a moment, I was like, gosh, that was a lot. Do I want to do it again? So I thought, yeah, but if I don’t do it, I’m gonna go get a job. I don’t want to get a job. I’m gonna, and I enjoyed it. I tell people this all the time. Not to digress, it’s just like two sentences. I say, listen, if you’re ever going through a really nasty divorce, buy a house to rehab it.

Quentin Edmonds (14:18)
Yeah.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (14:29)
And taking those cabinets off the wall, take a sledgehammer, beat everything, bust the toilets, rip that house apart. And and when you’re done, you’ll be like, huh, I feel so much better. That was my therapy, and I made 22 grand. I’m a happy camper. Structure of a house is the best form of like anger management. So I be I so I was actually more afraid of the second one because then I was like, wow.

Quentin Edmonds (14:45)
Absolutely.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (14:58)
a lot of work, you know. But then I did it. But then the second house and I don’t know how the hell this happened. I made fifty thousand bucks. And I lost my mind. I was like, my God, I have so much money. I don’t even like I’ve never even seen this much money in a bank account of anyone I know. So after that I was like I’m doing this full time. So the two things I love about the real estate is every single house I bought for all thirty five years, I always buy houses from the people that are in foreclosure.

I don’t get them on the MLS. I’m just I get them from the people in foreclosure because they’re losing their house. They don’t know what to do. Every investor wants to give them 500 bucks for their house. And it’s their biggest asset. They raise their kids. Like I and through my process, I lost my car and a house in foreclosure as well. My loser man just took off my house and my car. I got the baby though. So I understood. And I just felt like a need to help people.

Because nobody came to knock on my door, nobody mailed me a postcard, nobody offered to help me and I lost my house. And it was a terrible feeling. And so I thought, you know, I’m gonna help other people. So I started with door knocking, but then I liked it. So for the whole 35 years, I’ve stayed in the foreclosure side. So I get them directly from the courthouse. I work with them, I give them money, whatever they need to get a fresh start.

fix up their house and then you know sell it or rehab it or subject to or just whatever. And so for the whole time I’ve just stayed in the foreclosure end. People like, don’t you have a realtor and buy off the MLS? I was like, no, I just I don’t I have a heart for those people because I was one of those people. Terrible feeling and I didn’t have like any support. I mean I had support, my parents were so you know people were supportive, but they were like move back home, live with us. And I’m like, back in my bedroom.

Quentin Edmonds (17:19)
Yeah, yeah.

Right.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (17:32)
I’m gonna sit down in the ocean and pray that a shark would eat me.

Quentin Edmonds (17:35)
I love it. Well then so so what’s one operational thing you put in place the last two years that’s really made the biggest difference in how you run deals?

Dwan Bent-Twyford (17:47)
Well, gosh, I don’t know. There’s like so many things we’ve had to put in place now that we have all these buildings. So I think for us a lot of it is really really tracking like the money and the time you’re spending on this or that. We haven’t done any houses for the last five years ’cause we’ve been doing buildings. Okay.

But even with buildings, you know, you’ve got a crew and you know, you gotta run everybody’s hours and you gotta see like what’s the most important thing, what building do we need to work on first, what’s top priority, what’s lower down the level. And so we just have everything prioritized and what needs to be done. And so, like for us, one of the things we did is we put new roofs on everything. Yeah. Because the roofs were old. So roofs are a lot of I’m gonna tell you that roofs would be a lot of money. Yeah.

We like roofs, so we just start each building kind of like from the ceiling down. And and when I rehabbed houses, you know, obviously we would check the roof first, but I would start more with like the bathroom or the kitchen or whatever. But with buildings it’s a lot different because you’ve got sprinklers, you’ve got the roofs, you’ve got it’s all the beams between all the floors and you’ve got those little fake drop roofs that they use. I mean

Look up inside there. There’s like 10 million wires and what works and what doesn’t work. And what’s a fire hazard? What’s gonna catch on fire and burn our building down? So it’s been like safety first for us because these are old buildings. Most of our buildings are at least 100 years old. So it’s the safety, it’s getting rid of like the asbestos, it’s making sure it’s safe for everybody to work in, making sure the roof is good, replacing.

Each unit with its own heat and air as we go through each unit so we don’t have to pay those expensive boilers to heat because the heat’s a lot of money with those stupid boilers. Yeah. And so it’s it’s kind of been a learning experience. And a lot of it we talked with the guy that runs the fire department that does all the building inspections. When you come here, what are you looking for? And they gave us a list of everything that they inspect for. So we kind of take that inspection list from the

fire department and we start on the list from the top and kind of work down on each and everything because that’s what they’re gonna come back in and set. And I never knew about sprinkler systems. I’ve never rehabbed a house that had a sprinkler system. Like, do you know how much those things are? Like a hundred grand. It’s like

Quentin Edmonds (20:05)
Yes, ma’am. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, listen, I I want to get your philosophy on relationships. So what is your philosophy on business relationships? What are some of the relationships you have established within this real estate space that continue to help you out, maybe refer people to you or that you refer people to them? Like talk to me a little bit about your relationships and your philosophy on relationships.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (20:40)
So Bill and I are both extremely, we’ve been married twenty-five years now. We are both like really probably loyal to a fault. So I have the same title company for decades. So our title company also for the title company for if people that are new, that’s where you close all your deals. Now we’re in Iowa and Colorado and Florida. So we use title company in some of the states you have to use an attorney. So

Well, the same title company, the same title girl, same everything, because the title companies will do I don’t know what the we call we still call it a pencil search. I’m sure there’s a new term now, but they’ll kind of look it up and just say, Hey, I don’t see a bunch of liens on there to go for the house or the building. Before like an official title search that you have to pay for. They’ll kind of run it for you and say, Okay, I don’t see anything and we’ll buy it and then you know if something comes up. Because you know, people have liens and

mortgages and second mortgages they forgot about because they haven’t paid it. So they all forgot it was due. And and then title companies also can get get a list of foreclosures. So they’ll call and say, hey, we got some foreclosures in this week from the banks directly. Do you guys want to put in some offers? So we have a title company, we have two realtors that we work with forever and ever and ever and ever.

Yeah. And cause some of the how some of the things we buy on auction side. So we’ll buy it on the auction, we’ll bid it, but then our realtor will get some commission because we’ll put his number in. And then when we sell it, you know, he’ll sell it again. And then we have some mortgage, we have a couple mortgage guys that we work with. Like, I mean, I’m talking like two decades of the same people. We have insurance companies, because you need all that. We have investor friendly agents.

Quentin Edmonds (22:22)
Yeah.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (22:29)
We have rehabbers. Of course, you know, rehabbers come and go, but like our main guy’s been with us for years. And so just and and we went through several title companies. I’ve been through a bunch of realtors. I’ve been through a lot of people. But when you find the ones that are great and they get you, and they’ll do those little extra things, but just look at the title real quick when you’re in the car. Like you gotta take care of those people, you know. And you can’t do you can’t be a real estate investor by yourself.

Quentin Edmonds (22:50)
Yeah.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (22:58)
You need a title company, you need a mortgage broker, you need an investor-friendly real estate agent, you need a property manager, you need these things. It’s not a one man show. So I think having your team, I I don’t think people need to build their team before they do their first deal. Cause it’ll come like you’ll do your first deal and go, I need a title company. I need this, I need that. But I think once you get a really good team, you should be good to them, treat them.

Quentin Edmonds (23:06)
Yeah.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (23:23)
Give them gift cards, send them to concerts, give them money for restaurants and keep them because they are worth their weight in gold.

Quentin Edmonds (23:31)
Yeah, yeah. Listen, I appreciate you coming through today. You have given us so much enlightenment on your experience, on your journey, giving us real nuggets that we can hold on to. If someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you, ma’am?

Dwan Bent-Twyford (23:50)
So it’s really easy. I took my first name Dwan and I took the word wonderful and made Dwanderful. So I created a new name. So D-W-A-N-D-E-R-F-U-L Dwanderful.com and Dwanderful on all social medias. Just type in Dwanderful Podcast is the most wonderful real estate podcast ever.

Quentin Edmonds (24:15)
I love it.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (24:17)
On Threads, I’m on X, I’m on Facebook, everywhere is Dwanderful. That’s super easy. Like you can’t forget that.

Quentin Edmonds (24:23)
Yeah.

Can’t forget it. Dwanderful. Like this, you created the name. We can’t forget it. And listen, so much. You are the first at so many, Queen of Short Sale, Dwanderful. So I’m just so excited that you came through. I want to say three things to you sincerely. Thank you for your time. I think time is our most precious commodity. Thank you for your story. I believe stories plant real seeds for people that can grow. And thank you for your mindset. Thank you for bringing that mindset to this platform. I really, really appreciate you coming through today.

Dwan Bent-Twyford (24:56)
Well, I appreciate you having me on, Mr. Q.

Quentin Edmonds (24:58)
Absolutely. Well, listen, y’all heard Miss Miss Dwanderful. Everything’s wonderful. Please, everything she’s mentioned is in the show notes. Her contacts are in the show notes. Please get in contact with her. But definitely make sure you’re subscribed here because I promise you we’re going to continue to bring up amazing people, just like Miss Dwan. So, ma’am, thank you so much again. And everyone else, listen, y’all have a fantastic day.