Virtual Wholesaling Made Simple: How Beginners Find Buyers, Call Sellers, and Close Deals

Chris Logan – VWMS (00:00)
minimize the time between thinking about making the call and actually making the call. So I call that the gap. And the longer that you give your brain time to come up with excuses as far as why now is not a good time to cold call, the higher of a chance that you’re not gonna follow through and you’re gonna say tomorrow. Tomorrow’s the best day. Whereas if you minimize the gap, you set aside 30 minutes, 30 focused minutes for making calls.

Michelle Kesil (01:57)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil Today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Chris Logan, who is the co-founder of Virtual Wholesaling Made Simple online community and coaching program, showing new wholesalers how to land their first deal in 90 days. So excited to have you here today, Chris.

Chris Logan – VWMS (02:20)
Michelle, thanks for having me on. I’m really looking forward to our time together.

Michelle Kesil (02:23)
Great, let’s dive in. So first off, for those not familiar with You and Your World yet, can you share what your main focus is?

Chris Logan – VWMS (02:31)
Sure, yeah, so my name’s Chris Logan, as you said, my company’s virtual wholesaling made simple, and what I do is I specialize in helping new wholesalers how to land their first deal, even if they have a full-time job and zero experience, and get deals coming in consistently. When I started this journey into real estate, wholesaling was my entry, and happy to dive more into that here in a minute, or I could do it now, totally up to you, whatever feels best.

Michelle Kesil (02:56)
Yeah, definitely go ahead and tell us about it.

Chris Logan – VWMS (02:59)
Sure, yeah, so I started in real estate like lots of people listening here. ⁓ Knowing that real estate was the way to create wealth, but just not knowing where to start, because there’s like 52 different ways you can start in real estate, right? So I remembered reading the book Rich Dad Poor Dad, which is really what set me on the path to knowing that real estate was the path for me. And then I attended a three-day boot camp diving into the different ways you could make money in real estate. And there was one that really stood out to me, and that was wholesaling, because…

when the instructor drew on the board how you could profit from real estate without owning real estate and flip a piece of paper and make tens of thousands of dollars a month and you could do this multiple times a month, I was like, I’m all in, this is what I wanna do and I saw it as my path forward. So I’d love to say that our journey into wholesaling was amazing right out of the get go and things went well but.

actually there was a lot of things that went wrong and it took us six months to land our first deal. But once we landed our first deal, ⁓ things became much more smoothly. Our next deal came shortly after that. And then we eventually, two years before COVID, we decided to take this business and do it virtually, where we’re no longer meeting sellers in person, meeting buyers in person, we’re doing everything over the phone. And that was a godsend because by the time the pandemic happened,

Our business was 100 % virtual and while everybody else was scrambling around us wondering how they were gonna conduct business and meet sellers when they couldn’t, you know, go out and physically do these properties. So that was a really big blessing and that turned out to be one of the best years ⁓ that we’ve had in business. And so from there, we grew our business to over seven figures, put a team in place, and now we’re really passionate about showing others how to land their first deal.

Michelle Kesil (04:48)
Awesome, and is this operating nationwide?

Chris Logan – VWMS (04:51)
⁓ Yes, so when it comes to wholesaling virtually, we do it very differently than a lot of people do it. And for those listening now who maybe don’t know what wholesaling is, I’m just gonna give a ⁓ quick breakdown of what that is. So wholesaling is just simply connecting a motivated seller with a buyer that can solve their problem and you get paid to do it. So think about it like a matchmaking game. You help someone who wants to sell a house, find someone who wants to buy house, and you get paid for connecting them, right? So we do this virtually nationwide, but

The difference between us and how we do things versus other people is usually when you hear people talking about wholesaling houses nationwide, they’re doing it in every single state across the country. Our strategy is very different. It’s more targeted. What we do is we start with one territory, went virtual there, and then maxed out that territory, meaning there’s literally no more sellers for us to call in that territory. And then at that point, that’s when we layered on a second market and then a third and then fourth and so on.

And that’s really our approach. We really lay the foundation with one area so we’re not spreading our sell for our marketing too thin. And then we build on top of that by layering on more territories as we need to contact more sellers.

Michelle Kesil (05:59)
Awesome. And can you explain more about the virtual model? How is that differentiate from the typical wholesaling model?

Chris Logan – VWMS (06:55)
Yeah, so most wholesalers, what they’re doing when they’re first getting started, they’re told that local is the best way, right? Which local has a lot of challenges right now. ⁓ Big challenge with local right now is a lot of the rules and regulations have changed with wholesaling. And so a state that you could once wholesale without a license is ⁓ very different now. Some of those states require you to have a license to wholesale. Not everybody wants to get that. Some states have disclosures you have to make to the seller or the buyer.

that make it very difficult for things to go smoothly when you’re first getting started. So locally has become very inefficient. But the local model works like this. You’re getting your car, you’re driving to meet sellers in person, you’re walking around their property, you’re taking a look at everything, and then you have your contract, you have your clipboard, and you’re making your offer and having them sign right there, right? The tough part about Local2 is that

when you drive to a house, the seller swears they’re gonna be there and they’re not there and then you have to drive home and rush our traffic and it’s just too hard to fit all that in, especially if you’re doing this business while working a full-time job, it can be very time consuming. So the virtual side ⁓ makes a lot more sense because you can do this entire business from anywhere, from home, anywhere in the country. And so if you have a tight work schedule where you’re just getting home,

Like it’s very easy to just kind of hop on the phones from anywhere that you want and then be able to do this business and start reaching out to sellers. So ⁓ the virtual model for us, we went from doing five deals a month to 22 deals a month. Once we switched from local to virtual, simply by reinvesting the time we spent sitting in traffic into making calls and contacting sellers over the phone. So virtual was a complete game changer for us and

It’s where, if I could go back to the beginning of my journey, it’s where I would definitely start.

Michelle Kesil (08:47)
Listen, and how do you find the buyers and sellers?

Chris Logan – VWMS (08:52)
Yeah, so a lot of wholesalers, what they’ll do is they’ll start by finding the deal first. They’re told if you find a good deal, it’ll sell itself. But that advice is total baloney and it’s designed to keep people stuck, spinning their wheels, not doing deals. So what we do is we actually recommend people to new wholesalers to find the buyers first, our FYBF method. So you find your buyer first, you find out what the buyers want.

And by asking them questions about areas that they’re looking to buy in, areas they want to avoid, types of properties they want, types of properties they avoid. And then you use that to go pull a list in a software like Deal Machine or PropStream to pull a list of the exact types of properties they want. And then when you have that, you start making a lot of connections to those property owners, put a deal in a contract and bring it to them. When you do that, wholesaling becomes so much easier. So when it comes to finding buyers, one of the ways we love finding buyers

is through Facebook groups, real estate investment related Facebook groups. Because you have a bunch of people in a group that all are interested in real estate, you’ve got a combination of people in there, wholesalers, realtors, cash buyers. And a little hack is you can go into those groups and you can see a property that’s posted by a wholesaler and you’re gonna see in the comments, I’m a buyer, I’m a buyer, I’m a buyer, I’m a buyer. And then those are the people you’re gonna wanna reach out to to find out the type of buyer they are.

or the type of connection they are, and add them to your list. Once you understand what they’re looking for, you can start going and finding those types of properties, and you only need 25 of those types of contacts to be able to start reaching out to sellers. Then, when you start reaching out to sellers, you can do it in a much more targeted way, because you know exactly what buyers want. And when you do that, like I said before, wholesaling becomes so much easier.

Michelle Kesil (10:34)
Definitely. And what would you say are some of the main keys that have allowed your business to grow and run successfully?

Chris Logan – VWMS (10:42)
Yeah, I would definitely say, I would definitely say focus and consistency. That’s definitely something that a lot of people starting in this business really struggle with. Like I mentioned before, there’s 52 different ways you can start a real estate. A lot of times people try to do all of them all at once and they spread their energy out of all, energy over all these different strategies and wonder why they’re not having success. But the truth is for us, the success didn’t happen in our own business.

until we cut out all the other noise and we just focused on one thing. And then we took that a step further and we said, you know what, ⁓ wholesaling is the only strategy we’re gonna focus on. So let’s also apply this focus strategy to marketing. So instead of doing five different ways to find sellers, we’re gonna focus on one way. And for us, that was cold calling. Simply picking up the phone, having a lot of uncomfortable conversations, talking with sellers until someone said yes, and we could get that deal in our contract.

So once we applied that, that was able to scale and grow to where we are today. But simple is scalable and you cannot scale random activities.

Michelle Kesil (12:22)
you mentioned cold calling. think a lot of people get a bit nervous with that term. What are some ways that that process has been successful for your business?

Chris Logan – VWMS (12:32)
For sure. So a big reason ⁓ that cold calling is scary for a lot of people is because they’re focused on a lot of the limiting beliefs and fears they have instead of expecting a good outcome. So for example, when most new wholesalers are making calls, they’re thinking themselves, well, shoot, what if I don’t have a buyer for this deal? And the seller says, yes. And I put the deal on a contract and I can’t fulfill on my end of the deal and I have to cancel.

Right, so they have a fear of success. Then there’s other wholesalers that have a fear of failure, where they’re picking up the phone, they’re like, what if the seller curses me out? What if I mess up the script? What if I don’t say things the wrong way? And here’s the thing, you’re never gonna see these people ever again. It’s not like you’re gonna be in the grocery store picking out tomatoes and the person next to you is like, hey, you’re the one that messed up on that cold call. It’s never gonna happen, right? So ⁓ the biggest tip that I can give people who want to start in cold calling is this. ⁓

minimize the time between thinking about making the call and actually making the call. So I call that the gap. And the longer that you give your brain time to come up with excuses as far as why now is not a good time to cold call, the higher of a chance that you’re not gonna follow through and you’re gonna say tomorrow. Tomorrow’s the best day. Whereas if you minimize the gap, you set aside 30 minutes, 30 focused minutes for making calls.

and you pick up the phone right away and make the first call, doesn’t matter if you fumble it or whatever, ⁓ your chances of not only being able to get past the first call, but doing it consistently and sticking to that time is gonna be significantly higher. So for us, my first job that I ever had was in a call center, right? I was doing phone surveys for people in the Bronx around dinnertime.

And if you want to get real experience in rejection, that’s probably a good place to start. ⁓ So, for me, I’ve always been in jobs too where I’ve had to be in uncomfortable situations and talk to a lot of people. And so for us, it was more like, okay, our natural skill is being able to talk to people. So let’s turn off all the other marketing we had. We were doing like 20 or 30,000 direct mail pieces at the time, and we were really struggling with profitability.

So we’re like, we’re gonna turn off all the other pieces and we’re just gonna focus on having massive amounts of conversations. So I made the calls first, got our first deal on our contract and got it closed. And I think it was for like $23,000. And I said, there’s more to this. Cause back then nobody was really cold calling. This was like eight years ago. And so that’s when we basically took 20 % of the funds that we made from that deal, reinvested it back in the business and then hired our first ⁓ outsourced call center rep.

to make calls for us. And then we eventually grew that to a team of 10. And we cycled through that team like three or four times until we found our winners. And then that’s where we able to grow. And in our third month of cold calling was when we did 22 deals on our contract.

Michelle Kesil (15:30)
Amazing. And with your coaching program, how do you set it up? What is like the structure of the things that you’re teaching or the process that you walk your clients through?

Chris Logan – VWMS (16:25)
Yeah, yeah, great question. So most people when they’re first getting started, the biggest obstacle is not like tactical things. It’s the conversation that goes on between their two years because getting your first deal and even doing deals consistently when you’re first getting going in your first three years is all mindset. It’s like 80 to 90 % mindset, 10 to 20 % education. So the first thing that we do is we keep things very, very simple because when you confuse, you lose. If people get confused, they immediately

Hard stop, right? So we keep things very simple, number one. Number two, ⁓ what we do is we give people manageable sized steps to start with. There’s a big reason why the majority of New Year’s resolutions never come to fruition. And the reason for that is because people commit to unrealistic, over commit to unrealistic goals too quickly. So for example, someone will say,

I’m gonna cold call for four hours a day, you know, and I’m gonna do that, you know, for 90 days straight. Well, are you cold calling right now? No, I’m not. Okay, well, going from zero to four hours a day, do you see how that kind of sets people up to fail? Because in their first week, they might do it. Their second week, they might do it. Their third week, they might do it. But in that fourth week, life’s gonna get in the way. Responsibilities are gonna come up. Things are gonna come up that are gonna prevent them from doing that. And then they start the downward spiral.

They miss a day and then they get really hard on themselves and they think to themselves, shoot, can I really do this? Is this possible for me? If I can’t do four hours a day, then guess I just can’t do this business and they fizzle out, right? So what we focus on is saying, hey, start with 30 focused minutes a day. Anybody can do 30 minutes. Most people, you and I spend 30 minutes scrolling on our phone and social media. So anybody can do 30 minutes. So we have them focus on the 30 focused minutes.

get consistent with that and then layer on time. And we’ve seen that dramatically impact the progress that people make in a very short period of time. I have people that come to me that have a fear of the phone that say, I’m introverted, I’ve never been in sales, I’m 75 years old, can I do this? And our first step is breaking down all those limiting beliefs, finding out what’s keeping them stuck.

overcoming those so they feel like they actually can do this and then giving them a realistic and actionable plan is take the first step and then the next step and then the next step. So this way they can see themselves making progress. We can celebrate a lot of the small wins along the way that get them results and then from there they can finally get that end result they’re looking for and we support them all along that journey by giving them a proven process so they always know what happens.

Michelle Kesil (19:04)
Yeah, amazing. And are most people first time in wholesaling that come to you?

Chris Logan – VWMS (19:12)
Yeah, so I get a combination of people that come to me. I would say that the majority of people, ⁓ probably 85 % of our community are people who are wanting to do their first deal or they have done a deal and they’re just wanting more consistency. They’re wanting to see it happen over and over and over again, right? But then 15 % of the people we work with are people that

are doing deals consistently and they just wanna scale and grow. So ⁓ we help people in all of those buckets, but the main bucket that we specialize in helping people is from helping people go from zero to their first 30K a month consistently. So they’re landing their first deal, they’re turning into consistent business to make 30K a month, and then from there, we have another path that they can get on. But mainly, it’s helping them get up and get going and then getting consistent. And once they do that, we show them where to grow from there.

Michelle Kesil (20:06)
Yeah, amazing. And are you continuing to focus on scaling and growing your personal wholesaling business as well?

Chris Logan – VWMS (20:14)
No, you know, we’re really happy with where our business is at and what we’ve done. We’ve done over 600 deals. We’ve been in this business for over 13 years. And so our priority really now is keeping things where they’re at and then from there also showing our clients how to land their first deal, do deals consistently and doing joint venture deals with them.

Michelle Kesil (20:32)
Amazing. And what does your program look like?

Chris Logan – VWMS (20:36)
Yeah, great question. So our program is actually called the Virtual Freedom Formula. And what it looks like is ⁓ people will come in, we have an onboarding call with them to learn more about where they’re at on their journey and what their goal is over the next 12 months we’ll be working together. From there, we reverse engineer that goal and give them a step by step plan to hit it so they always know what happens next. And with every step they can take, they’re taking it towards landing their first deal or whatever their financial goal is. ⁓ From there,

⁓ Working with us, we support them ⁓ every week. We have weekly calls where they can bring their questions, we’ll answer their questions so they can continue to take confidence steps forward. And we also offer 911 calls. So if a client has an urgent issue, we know time kills all deals. If a deal is about to fall through or they need that one thing answered, we give them a call the same day or the very next day to get that question answered so they can take confidence steps forward. So really it’s a 12 month program, we work together.

and we’re all in on their success.

Michelle Kesil (21:36)
Perfect, thank you for sharing.

Well, before we begin to wrap up here, someone wants to reach out, connect, and learn more about what you’re up to, where can people find you?

Chris Logan – VWMS (21:46)
Yeah, great question. So the best place that people can reach me is on Facebook. I’m active across all platforms, but Facebook is really where I’m the most active. And my username on there is Chris Logan, R-E-I. And there’s even a link on my page there where you can join my free group, Virtual Wholesaling Made Simple, where we can show you ⁓ how we do this business from zero to your first deal, doing it consistently. And we actually do free trainings every Wednesday at 6 p.m. EST.

Michelle Kesil (22:11)
We’ll appreciate your time and your story. Thank you so much for being here.

Chris Logan – VWMS (22:15)
Awesome, Michelle, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun and I always enjoy being on your guys’ You guys provide so much value to the marketplace and real estate right now and always just cool to see what you guys are up to. So I appreciate you having me on.

Michelle Kesil (22:29)
Thank you, of course. And for those tuning into the show, if you got value, make sure you have subscribed. We have more conversations with operators like Chris, who are building real businesses and we will see you all on our next episode.