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The Other Side of Real Estate: Foreclosures, Wholesaling & Investor Compassion with Haven Wagner

By January 19, 2026Real Estate Pros Show


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Show Summary

In this conversation, Haven Wagner shares her journey in the real estate industry, focusing on her unique advantages as a realtor who primarily works with investors. She discusses the challenges and opportunities in the current market, the importance of networking and mentorship, and her personal experiences that shape her compassionate approach to clients. Haven also outlines her goals for building her brokerage and emphasizes the need to establish mutually beneficial relationships in business.

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    Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

    Haven Wagner (00:00)
    when I sit across from someone who’s losing their home,

    it gives me a different level of compassion because I actually have experienced it on a personal level. So I think that’s kind of one of the personality traits is I’m a very compassionate person. Just by nature, I love people.

    Quentin Edmonds (01:46)
    Hello everyone. Welcome to the real estate pros podcast. I am your host Q Edmonds and I’m excited to be here today. I have another fan, fantastic guest. And what I love about this young lady, hopefully she don’t mind me calling that. Okay. Cool. There’s a first thing came to mind. I’m like, Lord, please let that be okay. But, this, this lady here is young lady. What I love about her is that

    She works with investors, but she’s been an investor herself. So she understand kind of how the investor thinks. And it really helps her in the advantage to really help the investor to the best of her capabilities, which that’s what she wanna do. So she can think like an investor while she’s helping them. I ⁓ love it. mean, anything you’re looking to do, you’re looking to sell, fix, flip, like she’s gonna be able to help you out. And so I’m so excited to introduce you all to Ms. Haven Wagner

    Ms. Haven, how you doing today, ma’am? I’m doing great, doing great. Again, want to say thank you for being here. If I be honest, I kind of want to dive in. I want you to tell the people what your main focus is these days. I would love for you to make tickets on a little origin story of kind of how you got into real estate, maybe where the passion came from, and then tell us what part of the world you ran, what markets you’re operating in. And so Ms. Haven, ma’am, you have the floor.

    Haven Wagner (02:45)
    Good, how are you?

    Yeah, so I’m Haven Wagner. I’m a licensed North Carolina realtor, broker in charge of Rosam Capital Realty. So Rosam Capital Realty came into effect. ⁓ So in the past, I had gotten into wholesaling. When I got my real estate license back in 2017, I was a single mom. I really thought I was just going to hit the ground running. And I realized really quickly how hard it was to really create a name for myself and kind of get business on my own.

    I started going to some meetup groups and some investor meetup groups because I had flipped houses previously in the past. ⁓ I had done fix and flips and kind of knew that process, ⁓ didn’t feel 100 % comfortable doing it on my own. So I started going to these meetup groups just to get advice, to network. And someone had told me, you know, in real estate, when you get your license, you need to find your niche. You just need to find what your niche is and then just really hone in on that. So I started going to these meetup groups and

    ⁓ My goal was to find a property that I could flip. So I was like, I’ll meet a wholesaler here. I didn’t really know, I didn’t know what a wholesaler was to be honest. ⁓ So I went there, met some wholesalers. They’re telling me, well, if you want to get a deal, you need to talk with this guy or this guy. So I asked one of the gentlemen who’s kind of an OG wholesaler here in Charlotte, ⁓ been doing it since the nineties. He was a licensed realtor and ⁓ let his license go, strictly did wholesaling. So I met with him.

    And originally I was talking to him about finding me a good flip, a good fix and flip. And then I started kind of digging into asking him questions about how he got the properties, how, you know, how he found them, what these properties were. So he started talking about the foreclosure process and estate sales and, and, ⁓ probate properties. And I just got really intrigued. So by the end of that, long story short, by the end of that, I had somehow managed to convince him to mentor me, which he told me numerous times he did not do.

    I said, if I just follow you and he said, all right, if you do everything I tell you to do, I’ll split everything 50 50 with you, whatever deals you work on, I’ll split it 50 50, but you have to do it. So this was long before everything was online. So this was, I had to go to the courthouse numerous times a week and pull estate files and find the heirs and get their contact info. So it was a lot of, it was a lot of digging and research, which I love that part.

    ⁓ So I started kind of thinking, well, what if I can do wholesaling and be a licensed realtor? So where does that kind of match? So I did that for a while.

    Um, did a lot of wholesaling, made a lot of good connections. And then in 2024, it seemed like a good avenue to start our own brokerage. So my partner, he’s out of Atlanta, Georgia. Um, I’m right outside of, right outside of Charlotte in South Carolina. So I’m in a kind of a suburb of Charlotte, which is in South Carolina. So I’m right over the border. I work primarily in Charlotte and North Carolina, all the surrounding areas of Charlotte. So we decided it worked because he did wholesaling. He would give me leads that.

    didn’t work for his wholesaling model, but I was with another brokerage. So I came to him about the end of 2023 and I said, what if we just started our own brokerage and then any, any leads that you’ve already paid for can just go directly to our, our brokerage and I can list them, we can sell them. That’s the idea, but the, the truth of the matter is some of these properties that are hard to sell are hard to sell for a reason. So, you know, some of them are in a very distressed situation, so they may have a second mortgage. They may owe more than what the property’s worth.

    So in doing things like that, I have had to learn a lot about short sales foreclosures, the whole foreclosure process, the bidding process when it gets sold at auction. So I have learned a lot about that process. And that kind of has fed me into working primarily with investors. So I will help them find fix and flips, whether that’s going to a wholesaler. I do have a lot of wholesalers that I’ve gotten to know that I’ve kind of networked with. And I can offer that to investors as

    you know, it doesn’t have to be on the market. But if you find a property on the market, I’ll make the offer for you. So it’s just given me another kind of another lens that I can see things through. I don’t just see it through that of a traditional realtor. I don’t do a whole lot of traditional real estate. ⁓ You know, that might be a referral. So I might have a friend that wants me to help her find a house. That’s the most traditional real estate that I do. The majority of it is working with investors, working with distressed properties.

    working with foreclosures or estate properties, you know, family that needs to sell, you know, their grandmother’s house or something like that. So those are primarily the clients that I work with.

    Quentin Edmonds (08:06)
    Thank you. Thank you for sharing like your origin story, how you walked up to where you are now. I’m a great appreciated. ⁓ kind of, being honest with y’all kind of want to pick. want to peek into and pick into your personality and your, your history for a little bit. So this is what I mean, right? So I have a saying, what I say, destiny has no wasted moments, right? So there are things that we just acquire throughout our life, skill sets, tools.

    mindsets, perspectives that kind of help us be who we are today. So I’m listening to you, single mom, you had to learn the ropes, but then like I put being curious that you talk to the OG, like, listen, listen, OG, listen, I’m curious. Listen, and you can, and it showed me some of your tenacity. And then you talked about digging and researching. So I kind of just want to pick, peek into and pick into your personality. Like what personal tools have you picked up along the way?

    or development that’s kind of making you who you are today when it comes to a business person and actually just in your personal life period. Like what are the things that really help you on a personal and business level based on like who you are as a person? Understand what I mean? Does that make sense?

    Haven Wagner (09:16)
    Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. So I think ⁓ one of the things that I have seen as both a positive and negative characteristic is I always seek to see the good in people or the positive in people to a fault. And I’ll admit that to a fault. A lot of times I give people way too many chances to do me wrong and then I’m still surprised. So I think I’ve grown in that in where I give people less opportunities to do me that way.

    One of the things that it’s helped with is when people are in that situation, it’s given me the compassion to be able to talk to people. But I don’t know that I would have had that had I not been through a lot of the things that I have. So my parents, I was an adult, but my parents went through bankruptcy, foreclosure, all of that. They had a hundred investors calling them wanting to buy their property. So I heard that side of it years before I ever got into this. I watched my parents go through that and what that looked like to lose their home. And so

    when I sit across from someone who’s losing their home,

    it gives me a different level of compassion because I actually have experienced it on a personal level. So I think that’s kind of one of the personality traits is I’m a very compassionate person. Just by nature, I love people.

    At this point in life, really should be much more jaded.

    Quentin Edmonds (11:02)
    Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    Haven Wagner (11:03)
    And I think there are people in my life that are closest to me that have kind of had to steer me in, you do need to put some walls up. You can’t just be open game for everybody. But I think that that’s gotten me to a place where now I have a little bit more wisdom for what areas I kind of need to cut off. But I think the fact that I lived in parts of town when I was in my early to mid 20s that were considered not great areas of town, not places because

    we were doing fix and flips. So, you know, renovated the house I lived in. It was in a not good part of, you right outside of uptown Charlotte. ⁓ I remember my parents were very scared, but it was funny because my mom was more scared, but my dad was like, she’ll be fine. Because I do, I just got to know the neighbors. I got to know the people that lived in that neighborhood, whether they were the person that was, you know, asking for money on the street corner or whether it was a person that had lived there for 50 years and had seen all kinds of change go on in that community.

    ⁓ And some of them weren’t happy that we were coming in and renovating. It was making their taxes go up and they had lived there 50 years. ⁓ The part that I lived in was a, at one point I had been segregated. And so there were a lot of older folks that had lived there for years and years and they weren’t happy about us, me moving in there. And I didn’t let that deter me from building relationships with those people or attempting to build those relationships. So ⁓ there was only maybe one or two times I can remember that

    you know, kind of the hairs in back of your neck tell you that you’re in a bad situation. You know, the gas station right around the corner from my house, everybody said, you know, don’t ever stop there. Well, that was the closest one to my house. And I’m always on E. So that’s where I’m going to stop. I’m always on empty. So I always stopped there. I never felt in danger. And there was only one time that I did. And it was like my my whole body was just like, yeah, you need to go ahead and get in your car and go. But I think that’s given me, you know, the the mentor that I talked about, he ⁓

    he would very bluntly say, there’s certain doors you can go to and knock them. They won’t answer for me. And he said, so I’m to send you to those. And, you know, looking back now, it probably was a little dangerous. You know, I was going knocking on these people’s doors. They’re all raining a bad way financially. You know, they’re they’re mad at the world most likely. And to go on some of those people, you know, and knock on the door or, ⁓ you know, there were situations that, you know,

    They had let the house go. We purchased it from them. No one had been in the house. There had been squatters in there. ⁓ I had the deed in my name and had to show up at this property where this lady had a whole lot of charges that had been associated with that property and her name. I had a friend that was ⁓ a police officer with Charlotte Mecklenburg. He was also a licensed realtor. So I said, hey, I’ve got to go out to this property. It’s kind of in a sketchy area. I just don’t feel good going to it myself because there is somebody living in there that’s a squatter.

    So I went with him, he called me afterwards and he was like, I know that you, you you, have nerves of steel. He said, but don’t ever go to that property by yourself. And I said, what’s going on? Well, he had looked it up and there was all kinds of, you know, gang affiliation, all of this, but I had to ask her nicely, you know, I need you to leave the property. You know, I, I now own it and I need you to leave the property. I was able to work it out with her where she did. She left, you know, of her own, ⁓ of her own accord. And, but I think a lot of

    kind of how I was raised is, you you look at the person, not everybody in a bad part of town has ill intent. So I think that kind of gave me, it’s not that I don’t have, I do have judgment in those situations, but I also know that not everything is to be feared. So I think that quality about me and the fact that I was just a hustler. mean, I had young kids at the time and I knew, you know, in order to pay this bill, something’s gotta close. And if I don’t,

    call somebody today, nothing’s going to close at the end of the month, I’m not going to have rent next month. So I think that kind of hustler mentality of, know, I was climbing through windows of properties that, know, I had bought the deed to they didn’t leave the keys, you know, and I remember asking my mentor, I was like, this is I’m not gonna get arrested, right? Like, is okay. You know, and he said, No, we own the deed, you know, you’re able to we don’t have the keys and the person left with the keys moved out and left and so we didn’t have a way to get into the property and I needed to sell it quickly. So

    Those types of things, you when I look back on, kind of laugh because it really was just, this is what needs to be done. This is what I have to do. And this is how it’s going to get done. And there’s, there’s nobody else to fall back on. So, ⁓ I think that part of my personality is kind of what helped me just really get into kind of that other side of real estate, you know, not the traditional stuff, but all of all the other stuff that’s going on in the background. I think that’s kind of what helped me. And I was just very curious. I was very curious about how it all went, went on.

    and I’m a bargain shopper. if I can get a house from a wholesaler at 120,000 or I could go get it from the owner at 100, that’s a savings. So when he started telling me how he got the properties, was like, so you’re making that difference. So how do I do that? And he kind of laughed, but by the end of the lunch, think he saw that I was willing to learn. was willing to do whatever it took. And I did. The stories that I have, I kind of joke about, I should write a book about,

    kind of that other side of real estate, you know, of having to go meet with people at, you know, a nursing home to get something signed and having to hire mobile notaries for a deal that I had, they had 16 heirs and I had to find all of their spouses and have the, you know, this signed. It took me three months to get that deal done. But just those types of things, I think I just have a, I’ll figure it out kind of mentality. So if somebody says, this is going to be really difficult, you know, it’s in foreclosure, they got a second, okay, well, I’ll figure it out. Like I’ll figure it out.

    The negative part about that is sometimes if I’m trying to figure it out, takes me longer to realize that I just need to kill this deal and not waste any more time on it versus always thinking that something can be done.

    Quentin Edmonds (17:22)
    Yeah. Miss Haven, thanks. So when somebody go into as depth of explanation that you have with that question, I always like to say thank you for the gift of your vulnerability, right? Because you shared with things that you didn’t have to share. But obviously what you shared is very impactful and it gives another side that we obviously could not even imagine. I mean, I

    Some of the things you said, I really couldn’t imagine, right? We talk, I hear people’s stories, but that’s why I always say everybody’s perspective is unique. And so really, honestly, genuinely, thank you for sharing because I believe you’re giving our audience things that they have never expected, never thought about. And I think that raises our, it can, depending on who we are, it should raise our empathy level when we’re dealing with certain people, because we never know.

    what people are going through, what their experience is. so again, I thank you for your gift of vulnerability. I thank you for sharing your experience when it comes to real estate, because that’s what we do here. Like real estate has so many sides to it. And there is the human emotional perspective of real estate. And sometimes we just don’t talk about enough. We talk about transactions, we talk about deals, we talk about strategies, burn, DCR, you know, the loans, like we talk about everything else. But sometimes we don’t talk about the hanging perspective.

    I appreciate you Shane, I really, do.

    Haven Wagner (18:44)
    Yeah, absolutely.

    Quentin Edmonds (18:45)
    Absolutely. So let me ask you this. What’s the next real goal for you? What are you looking to solve a scale next?

    Haven Wagner (18:51)
    ⁓ I really would like to build the brokerage. I think there’s so much untapped. There are things that I’m not good at. So trying to do all the day-to-day stuff. would love to get to the point where I could have an assistant who would do all of the paperwork. I am not organized enough to have the amount of deals that I have going on at a time. it really does take, know, if I could have somebody that I could say, hey, can you fill out this offer to purchase for this amount, you know, give them all the details.

    and someone else could do that and get it sent off. That’s not where my gifting is. ⁓ I’m much better if I can be out talking to people, networking, ⁓ being in front of people, people through those situations versus sitting behind a desk because one, I’m not the best at it, so it’s gonna take me two times longer than it would someone that is very gifted at that. So ⁓ my goal would be to try to grow the brokerage to the point where could have an assistant who’s doing all of the stuff that I’m not a fan of doing so that I could spend more time

    you know, getting more clients, talking to more investors that need a realtor. And a lot of investors, they do have their realtor that they use. So, you know, they’ll have someone that they use primarily. I just need to find the investors that don’t already have one and kind of just let them know, you know, can, there’s a lot that I can do with creative financing. I do also have a lot of contacts and connections that I can put people in touch with that could be helpful to investors. So I think, you know, from that perspective, really the main thing that I would like to do is

    I would like to grow the brokerage because I want something that I can say I built. Other than, you know, building children, you know, I’ve raised children, built human beings. I would like something that I can show and, you know, I can say, you know, yeah, I put a lot of time into this and this is what I built.

    Quentin Edmonds (20:32)
    Gotcha. Well, I, you know, I have a wife that’s building a child and let me tell you, your skills are definitely transferable to be like y’all can build whatever y’all want to. So there’s no doubt in my mind that you’re going to build a brokerage. And I’m saying that sincerely, like from your curiosity to the way your analytical brain works with research and digging things up to your fearlessness. There’s no doubt in my mind that the brokers will be built. It’s just a matter of time, right?

    And so my wife and I, have this saying when we say time takes time, right? So you, gotta put, it’s a certain amount of time that you have to put in before things, you know, kind of just start to happen. And here, matter of fact, I got this book here. I show it maybe, maybe once every other podcast, but it’s called Gradually Then Suddenly, right? And so it’s by Mark Batterson. And he says, success happened two ways. Gradually, then suddenly. The gradual part is like,

    climbing through windows. The graduate part is ⁓ going to ⁓ gas stations that people say avoid. The graduate part is talking to people that people would normally avoid. The graduate part is pointing to your kids, making sure that they are emotionally sound, financially sound, making sure that they are safe. Those are all the graduate parts to success. And so, the suddenly happens when all the things just kind of just

    happen together before you know it just deals are coming and you’re building a brokerage and you got an assistant. So I’m just saying all those things are definitely going to come for you because you’re taking care of the gradual part. suddenly part is definitely on its way for sure. So just saying that.

    Haven Wagner (22:10)
    ⁓ That’s what I’m holding out for. ⁓

    Quentin Edmonds (22:13)
    It’s coming for sure I just I want to put a bow on this because I think asking you this question is Important because of your empathy because of the way you connect with people I just want to hear your perspective or maybe even your strategy on building relationships Like how important is building relationships to you?

    Haven Wagner (22:31)
    It’s really important. And I think it’s important to weed out pretty early on the folks that are just using you. as a realtor, honestly, so for example, my partner that owns the brokerage with me, he’s a wholesaler, an investor out of Atlanta. The first time we ever met, gosh, I want to say it’s probably maybe almost four years ago, five years ago now, I kind of was his boots on the ground in Charlotte. That’s what he needed. Well,

    He needed me to run comps for him, go out to a property, take a look at it, meet with the owner and all that. And it was about an hour away from where I live. So I was like, this guy’s gonna have me driving all the way out here. Nothing’s gonna come of it. I’m gonna have wasted my time and gas, you know, all this. What got me about him was, is he valued my time. So he said, you know, here it is and I need you to meet with her, take some pictures so I can get an idea of the condition of the interior.

    get any other information you can from her. And then you would just send me the pictures and then I’ll send you X amount of money for your time and your gas. That was a first. mean, would have people, would have investors message me all the time, now, can you run comps on this property and you run comps on it then you never hear from them again. Well, it’s not just a five minute process. know, like if you’re putting, especially if it’s a distress property, like you need to look at what the ARV is and all that. And so I would have so many people that were doing that. So I think really weeding out the ones that valued your time, that respected your time.

    that understood that your time was valuable, weeding those out from the ones that actually, they really are just kind of floating from realtor to realtor until one cuts them off and then they’ll go to the next one and get comps and then they’ll cut them off because they may have their own realtor to list stuff, but maybe that realtor is not as available to them when they need things. So that was kind of, I had to start kind of getting a little bit of discernment.

    you know, for the folks that am I just wasting my time or is this going to be a mutually beneficial relationship? So that’s kind of been the biggest hurdle for me because like I said, it, it’ll take me a little bit before I’ll be like, yeah, this person’s not really, you know, we’re not, this is not a mutually, a two way street, you know? So that, think I’ve gotten better at that. It’s still something that I am constantly working on though.

    Quentin Edmonds (24:33)
    No, I love I just you know, I really I love the way you explain things and I’ll say this about me. I am definitely recovering people-pleaser I’m not safe recovering because I’m not going back to it, but I am learning to To identify that people pleasing me and put a boundary there. That’s what I’m to do ⁓

    because for so long, know, I’ve allowed people, I’ve conditioned people to see, to treat me a certain way. I really understand that sometimes no is a complete sentence. Like sometimes it’s no, and that’s it. You know, don’t, there’s no explanation. There’s no nothing. And so I’m learning how to set boundaries up in every facet of my life, business, personal boundaries to myself. Like there’s, there’s, there’s hard stops I got to put for myself to say, you know, if you go over that boundary, you just want to keep going.

    And you’re going to keep pushing the boundary out further and further. We got to stop it right here. And so I love hearing your self-awareness because I just think that you’re going to continue to hone that skill of wisdom, discernment. And I think it’s going to continue to serve you as you continue to grow because you’re going to continue to grow. There’s no doubt in my mind, way your mindset is set up, you’re going to continue to grow and be successful. so I’m just, again, thank you for your gift of vulnerability, Sham, with us about the good, the bad, the ups and downs, and even

    places that you’re still trying to overcome. So I really appreciate that. So Ms. Haven, if someone wanted to get in contact with you, connect with you, collaborate with you, how can they get in contact with you,

    Haven Wagner (26:07)
    Yeah, so the best way I can I get my phone number on here? I mean, So my personal phone number is 704-213-5155. My email is Haven. It’s H-A-V-E-N at Rosemcapital.com. That’s R-O-S-E-M, capital.com. ⁓ I’m on Facebook. I’m on Instagram. You can look at me up personally. It’s just Haven Wagner or Rosem Capital Realty. We have both Instagram and Facebook for.

    personal and the business. ⁓ Feel free to reach out to me there if you have any questions about any kind of tricky situations. If you are a wholesaler and you’re worried that you won’t be able to wholesale, ⁓ I have talked to my real estate attorneys about that and kind of gotten the inside scoop on that. So I’m willing to share that information. ⁓ And then just if you have any questions about real estate in general, ⁓ I love talking about real estate. I love helping other people ⁓ and working and kind of connecting that way. So yeah, I’m…

    Definitely shoot me a text, give me a call.

    Quentin Edmonds (27:01)
    Gotcha. Absolutely. Well, Ms. Haven, let me just say one, thank you for your time. You told a beautiful story about how the person valued the time. So we know time is our most precious commodity. So thank you for your time today. Thank you for your story. know, the late Kobe Bryant said, nothing in this world moves without story. There’s a story attached to everything, to the computer that went on, to the cameras that we use.

    Even my glasses probably got a serial number. Everything has a story that can trace back. So definitely thank you for sharing your story, your origin story to get to your vulnerability. Appreciate that. And lastly, thank you for your perspective. Thank you for your mind, the way you think and bringing that mindset to this platform. I really believe you’ve given enough seeds that somebody might have a mind shift around their situation, around what they’re facing, around their business goals. And so I appreciate you so much for being here today.

    Haven Wagner (27:54)
    Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much, Q. I appreciate the time.

    Quentin Edmonds (27:56)
    Absolutely. So listen, you can’t tell me y’all didn’t get the value from the table. You cannot tell me So definitely check out look her up check her out, but definitely make sure you’re subscribed here You do not want to miss out. I promise you we’re gonna get seen to bring up amazing people just like miss Haven So ma’am, thank you again to everyone else. We’ll see you on the next time

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