How to Build a Real Estate Wholesaling Deal Machine | Acquisitions, Sales and Dispositions

Mike Gomes (00:00)
Here’s my play. I would find somebody, maybe like myself, that has thousands of cash buyers that they have access to, and I would be like, Hey, Mike, I am going to find a deal in the next week. But here’s the thing. I’m looking to squad up with somebody who has thousands of buyers, and I would just split the deal with you. Is there any way if I go ahead and generate some leads and send you over those leads. Can you let me know what price you would have a cash buyer at? And then once I get it under contract, we can squad up on the deal together. That’d be my first step.

Scott Bursey (02:04)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast, powered by Investor Fuel. I’m your host, Scott Bursey. And today we’re thrilled to have Mike Gomes from Silver Homes joining us. Mike is an active real estate investor, flipper, and wholesaler making waves in the New England market. We’re going to dive into what makes his operation tick. And pros, you can expect some actionable insights on scaling a flipping and wholesaling business in a competitive region. Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike Gomes (02:35)
Scott, thank you so much, brother.

Scott Bursey (02:39)
It’s just awesome having you here and to help our listeners get up to speed. Please give us the ninety-second highlight reel of how your career ignited and where you’re pouring your fuel now.

Mike Gomes (02:51)
Love that. Yeah, so I was just about to get out of college and I heard a radio ad that said that you can get into real estate without any money. And I’m like, you know what? That sounds great. That sounds like something that I’d love to be a part of. So I went to this two-hour workshop and they funnel you into like a three-day workshop. You get to pay a hundred bucks. I literally had no money at the time. I had to borrow the hundred dollars from one of my buddies’ credit cards. So I go to this three-day workshop, maybe like a month later. And I sit on that information for a good maybe five years. And throughout those five years I was just kind of an all-American hustler doing all the different hustles that you could kind of imagine. And it finally got time for me to take the jump and get into real estate. So I connected with a local fix-and-flipper and I was like, Hey, I’d love to help you in whichever way I could possibly help. He kind of showed me the ropes and after hanging out with him for a couple of months, it came time for me to find my first deal. And that’s when I hit the ground running. I and I started to do whatever I could possibly do to try to find a deal. And it didn’t go out as how I planned it was going to go. It took a little bit longer. You know, I started marketing and I started trying to find a deal and I didn’t get one for seven months. And in that seven-month time period, you know, it was pretty frustrating. I remember I had a deal under contract that fell through out of that time period and I was getting ready to quit real estate pretty much for good. I’m like, all this stuff that I’m learning on YouTube is a lie. It’s gotta be fake. It just I don’t think it really works. And then I saw an ad from a guy named Pace Morby. And I gave it a shot. I’m like, hey, this this guy’s saying that he has some sort of mentorship. Let me see if I can learn. And I get in his mentorship on the first day that I’m in there. End up on a Zoom with him. He gives me some great advice. And within the first three weeks after that, I ended up landing my first deal. And really once I got that first deal, the rest was kind of history. I went to a seller’s house. Seller was like, hey, my tenants just left and I will take two hundred and seventeen grand for the property. So I’m like, okay, boom, sign this contract. I ended up assigning that to the guy that actually helped me in the beginning, the fix-and-flipper that I was working with. I assigned it to him for twenty grand and I made my first twenty grand in real estate and I was like baffled. I’m like, Whoa, this is life-changing. I can just I can do this over and over again. And that’s what I did. I just repeated the process and now we’re here.

Scott Bursey (06:16)
Thanks for sharing that, Mike. It’s always fascinating to see how that initial spark turns into a full-blown operation. And you know what really caught my attention about you was the way you’ve been able to navigate the New England market with such agility, especially balancing both flipping and wholesaling. And on that note, Mike, curious to know, looking at your strengths in the current market, how do you keep your acquisition funnel full while staying selective on deals?

Mike Gomes (06:48)
Hmm, that’s a great question. When you talk to a lot of people that are in real estate or that are trying to get in real estate, one of the biggest problems that they have is having deal flow, like finding the deals. And for the first, I would say three years of my real estate career, I was just really laser-focused on acquisitions, meaning I built out a sales team that marketed directly to sellers with cold calling and texting, and that’s all we focused on. I’m like, hey, virtual team, you guys go out, call all these sellers, text all these sellers, and set me up on as many appointments as possible. So I did that for a good two or three years straight, and I just kept on going on appointments and getting deals. I wasn’t even the guy that found the cash buyer. I gave that job to somebody else and I outsourced it to another team. So my sole focus was just focusing on building the sales team. And then later on down the line I started buying a couple of flips with my wife. And then after that we started launching our dispositions department within Silver Homes so that we didn’t have to rely on everybody else to find our cash buyers. We were just finding them for ourselves. And now we’re here. So, you know, it’s, I would say, the ability to build that out in the beginning so that it was a well-oiled machine and it kept cranking out deals, allowed that to be the heartbeat of the business, which then allowed us to start going into other different marketing channels and stuff like that. And that’s when the business really started to explode. But it wasn’t until we really got this to be a well-oiled machine. And when I say this, I’m saying the acquisitions department, like, hey, let’s make sure we’re getting a couple of deals per month no matter what, with our acquisitions team. And then we can start having fun with all the other stuff and doing flips and adding on other marketing channels and everything like that. But now that we have multiple different marketing channels and stuff, the deals kind of just come from everywhere.

Scott Bursey (08:53)
Following up on that, what’s one tool or process you couldn’t live without in that funnel?

Mike Gomes (08:59)
I would say a sales process. That’s really what we built everything off. There’s a book called Clockwork, and Mike Michalowicz wrote this book, and in this book he talks about a Queen Bee Role in a business. And this is like the role in a business that the business just wouldn’t survive without. And for us that role is sales, the sales process. ‘Cause you could generate as many leads as possible. Shoot, we can go out and generate two hundred leads, but if you don’t have a closer that can bring those leads through a sales process and get them to sign a contract, you’ll never make money. So really being able to build rapport with a seller, understand what their circumstances, being able to walk through walk them through a contract and get them to sign the contract and negotiate and all that type of stuff. I would say that is probably the biggest the biggest thing.

Scott Bursey (10:29)
Let’s dig into your weaknesses or rather the challenges you faced. What was the biggest hurdle you had to overcome when you started scaling in New England?

Mike Gomes (10:40)
Hmm. So up here in Massachusetts specifically, we do about ninety percent of our deals up here in Mass. Actually this is the same thing for Rhode Island and Connecticut, the other states that we operate in as well. We’re an attorney state. So that means there’s usually a buyer’s attorney and there’s usually a seller’s attorney in the transaction, which is great some in some aspects, but for the sake of working a lot of deals at once. It can get pretty hectic. You got multiple attorneys on every single deal. Sometimes there’s three different attorneys. There could be the seller’s attorney, our attorney, and the buyer’s attorney. And sometimes it gets to be too many cooks in the kitchen, especially when you’re working eight deals a month. You know? So as we started to scale, we were like, Whoa, there’s way too many people involved on all these different transactions. We gotta slow down and make sure that we’re, you know, making sure everybody’s communicating in a very fluid way.

Scott Bursey (11:47)
What is the vision of Silver Homes, let’s say the next twelve to twenty-four months, and then maybe a little bit further down the road if you could elaborate on the next five-plus years?

Mike Gomes (11:57)
Yeah, the next twelve to twenty-four months, our acquisitions department is where I’d like it to be. Maybe we can add on a little bit more fuel to the fire when it comes to marketing and doing a couple more internal deals. But really, my goal for the next twelve to twenty-four months is to help as many wholesalers out like me back five, six years ago when I was first starting, get their business off the ground and do some deals with them. Now what this looks like for Silver Homes is us dispoing their properties. Right. So we do a lot of a lot of networking and a lot of community building within the market up here with local wholesalers that are just getting started and we’re helping them out with getting their marketing off the ground, getting their sales off the ground and underwriting their deals and everything like that. And in return, they end up bringing us leads. So they’ll bring us leads, we’ll be like, hey, this is a great lead. We have cash buyers for it. We’ll handle the rest of the transaction. Like we’ll even help you get it under contract. And then what my dispositions team does is they go ahead out and they go ahead and they have an open house for that particular property. We sell the deal usually in about three days or so, and we take care of the rest of the transaction. So the wholesaler doesn’t have to do anything. They don’t have to talk to the cash buyer. They don’t have to talk to the seller. They don’t have to talk to the attorneys. Throughout the la- the last leg of the transaction, we just handle that for them. So for the next twelve to twenty-four months, the goal is really to just help as many of those people out as possible and do as many deals with the people up here in this market as possible.

Scott Bursey (13:43)
It’s great to see your opportunities with the market shifting. Where are you seeing the most potential for growth in your business right now, Mike?

Mike Gomes (14:32)
Really just in the dispositions department. I say that because when I was first starting out, I was saying no to a lot of opportunities that I actually could have said yes to. And the reason being is just because I simply didn’t have all the resources that that I needed to execute on those deals. So what would this look like? Well, it would be it would be like, hey, I have a hundred leads that got generated and I was only able to get one contract out of it and I really could have got three or four. One, because my sales wasn’t that good at the time, but really two because I didn’t know that those other three or four deals were deals. I didn’t know that there was a cash buyer out there for those deals simply because I was going off of maybe one buy box. I was going off of some numbers that I heard on YouTube. I didn’t really have a a really good pulse on the market. So the biggest opportunity I would say is, you know, we have a really good pulse on the cash buyer market up here. And it baffles my mind sometimes on the price points that we’re able to sell these deals at. But the reality is a lot of buyers buy for different reasons. We’ve sold deals to people that are like putting their contractors in properties. Like they have, they’re, they’re trying to have a a place for their contractor to live. So they’ll just buy a house in cash, they’ll renovate it and then have their contractor go move in. And they’re looking at kind of like a long-term play. There’s a million different reasons why somebody is wanting to buy a house, but my problem was in is in the beginning was I was just kind of looking through one lens when really there’s thousands and thousands of buy boxes out there, which ultimately allow us to sell more deals. So I would say the opportunity is to really be able to identify how and how much a deal is gonna get sold for and how the deal is gonna get sold, yeah.

Scott Bursey (16:29)
Building on that, are you looking at new geographic territories or are you going to be doubling down on your existing turf?

Mike Gomes (16:41)
Really just doubling down up here. I have no desire really to go out outside of this market at this point. The long-term goal, you had asked me earlier what maybe the five-year goal is. That’s really to build a portfolio out here in in Massachusetts. And I’d really like to just stay local. I love it up here. This is where I’m from born and raised up here, so I just love doing deals in my backyard. I get there’s a lot of people that, you know, like doing the virtual wholesaling thing and the virtual flipping thing or having a portfolio in an easier market like Ohio or something like that. But for me, I’m like, I want to touch and feel the real estate. I want to go on an appointment with a seller and hang out in their living room and chop it up. You know? So yeah, really just doubling down here.

Scott Bursey (17:34)
How are you protecting your margins against rising material cost and shifting buyer sentiment in in that very region?

Mike Gomes (17:43)
Really just getting creative. Really getting creative and utilizing all of our resources. So for example, my wife and I flip houses on top of me running the wholesale team. And when we’re flipping houses, we’re getting quotes from a lot of different people. But because we have a wholesaling team, we’re connected to so many cash buyers that have so many different contractors and so many different resources that we’re not just strapped to maybe one team. So we can reach out, for example, I have a flip going on right now and I need a new electrician for it. And I have a guy who literally built six townhomes right down the street who has a great who has a great electrical guy who did those townhomes who will do this house for much cheaper. So it’s really like being able to utilize all the resources that we have at our fingertips.

Scott Bursey (18:37)
That’s smart. And getting into your tactic, when it comes to your team, how do you handle the bottleneck of finding quality boots-on-the-ground talent in in the New England area?

Mike Gomes (18:52)
We’ve done a pretty good job of retaining people. Like the average person on on our team has been with us for two to three years. So it’s really been about retention. And what I’ve learned is it comes down to just pouring into your people and just really caring. Like it’s not just about, hey, let’s go out and do a bunch of deals and make a bunch of money. It is like, hey, bro, how is your how are you doing with your with your wife? How are you doing with your family? We’ll, we can go out and hang out and play golf and stuff like that. So it’s not just it’s not just a, you know, transactional relationship with the team. This is something more of like a family type.

Scott Bursey (19:36)
When you bring on a new team member, Mike, what is the first thing that you look for to ensure they fit the Silver Homes culture?

Mike Gomes (19:46)
I’m gonna say a servant’s mentality. That being at the at the forefront of how they operate. And what that means is like, hey, is serving at the forefront of your mind or is just making a check at the forefront of your mind?

Scott Bursey (20:07)
Core values always wins. Thanks for sharing that insight. Mike, curious to know what does your professional network look like right now?

Mike Gomes (20:18)
What do you mean by that?

Scott Bursey (20:22)
As far as what you have as network relationship building, what sort of groups are you involved in in your region?

Mike Gomes (20:31)
Got it. As I was explaining earlier, I was one of the I don’t know, shoot, maybe the first like five hundred people in Pace Morby’s mentorship, and I don’t know how many he ha he has now. I think maybe over twenty thousand or something like that. But that was really the main community that helped me out, you know. That’s the community that I got my first deal in. And shout out to Pace man and his SubTo group. SubTo is I don’t I’m not too sure if you’re too familiar with Pace and the SubTo group, but they have made a lot of noise in the real estate industry. And what’s great about the SubTo mentorship is even though it’s a nationwide thing and a lot of these nationwide things are just kind of weird and virtual, Pace has done a really good job of regionalizing it. Meaning like, hey, there’s SubTo New England group. There’s a SubTo Florida group where those people all hang out. So when I was first starting out, it was really good to just be able to go to a meetup and hang out with the people in my market that were doing deals.

Scott Bursey (21:47)
Thanks for being open about the people that help fuel your business. And Mike, if you had to start your real estate journey over from zero today, let’s say, with no capital, but all your current knowledge, what is the very first move you would make to generate ten thousand dollars?

Mike Gomes (22:08)
Hmm, that’s a great, great, great question. Here’s my play. I would find somebody, maybe like myself, that has thousands of cash buyers that they have access to, and I would be like, Hey, Mike, I am going to find a deal in the next week. But here’s the thing. I’m looking to squad up with somebody who has thousands of buyers, and I would just split the deal with you. Is there any way if I go ahead go ahead and generate some leads and send you over those leads. Can you let me know what price you would have a cash buyer at? And then once I get it under contract, we can squad up on the on the deal together. That’d be my first step. And then the second step is I would scrape either the MLS data or even if I didn’t have MLS access, I would go on Zillow and do this. And I would look at every single fixer-upper that’s on the market. And I would call those agents and knowing that it’s tough to sell and to wholesale on-market deals, I’d be keeping in mind the relationship with that agent as I’m having a conversation about that particular property that they have listed, I would try to get a deal on that particular property, but when I don’t, the real gold would be in them sending me some off-market properties that they have. And I really think that in the first shoot, maybe in the first day, I I guarantee in the first week, if I just put my time down and just did that, I would land a deal pretty quick. So I would go directly to a agent, I would try to find I would try to work a deal with them and then once I got it under contract, I would then send it over to the dispositions partner that I made a connection with and I’d be pretty confident that I could get a ten thousand dollar deal done in the in the first month or so.

Scott Bursey (23:55)
That is gold. What a roadmap. Thank you for that, Mike. And Mike, you have given us a lot of really good words of wisdom here today. But is there any additional gold nugget or two that you could leave with our pros?

Mike Gomes (24:12)
Something very simple. You know, when I was first starting out in those seven months when I said that I wasn’t getting a deal, I remember reaching out to the guy that was helping me out, the fix-and-flipper that I was telling you about. And I was just frustrated. I’m like, man, I’m tired, man. I’m, I haven’t gotten a deal yet. I’ve spent money, I’ve spent a ton of time, I’ve been learning, I’ve, it’s just, and it’s just not working. And he told me one thing, very simple. He just said, Do not quit. Because I was about to quit. I was telling him, I’m like, I think I’m just gonna say, forget it to this thing. And he simply just said, Do not quit. So those three words, do not quit. It’s very simple, but those three words, for whatever reason, when he said that to me, it just hit. And I was like, All right, I’m just not gonna quit. And really what it was is it’s like, if you quit, then you will never do a deal. So you can guarantee the fact that if you quit, you’ll never get a deal done. And as I thought about that, I’m like, You’re right, I’m not gonna quit. And I’m glad that I didn’t quit because it would be maybe a month or two, three months later, that I would end up with my first deal and that kind of got me going.

Scott Bursey (25:31)
Do not quit. It’s all about resilience. Thank you for that, Mike. And for those of our listeners that want to keep this conversation moving, stay in your lane or collaborate with you, what is the best way for them to reach out to you?

Mike Gomes (25:47)
Yeah, they can go to wholesalewithmike.com and what we do is we do a monthly Zoom where we just hang out and we talk about deals, we do some underwriting and all that stuff. That’s really the place where they can find me and hang out with me.

Scott Bursey (26:06)
Mike, thank you so much for joining us today on the Real Estate Pros podcast.

Mike Gomes (26:11)
For sure, Scott. Thanks for having me, bro. This is great.

Scott Bursey (26:17)
And to our listeners, we appreciate you. If you receive value from today’s episode, please subscribe. We’ll be fueling your tanks with a lineup of elite guest, just like Mike Gomes, who are accelerating and setting the pace for the rest of the industry. Until next time, keep your standards high and your vision clear. We’ll see you in the next episode, everyone.