How Real Estate Wholesalers are destroying the markets for the rest of us!

Short Sale Homes

This month we experienced 3 Real Estate Wholesalers who held our Willow Glenn Short Sale Listing hostage; only to cancel after we got the Short Sale approval for EACH !! Their antics cost our Home Sellers to miss a payment and damage their credit; not to mention the uncertainty and frustration that it created with the Short Sale Lender which was forced to issue 3 approval every week!!

Mind you this property was NOT real Fixer Upper and has potential to be rented AS-IS or remodeled for a flip that could easily sell for $950,000.

It appeared that every idiot who had purchased a DVD or watched the HGTV program Flipping for Profits was chasing after this home!! In fact, I would be the last one to complain about the positive role that Real Estate investors can play in returning the Real Estate Market back to normal. But when there this much pure market speculations it’s un-healthy because it never allows for the last transaction between 2 principals (Buyers and Sellers) to materialize.

The 1st Wholesaler had been featured on HGTV as specialists on Fixer Upper flips. They backed out because we had set the price fairly close to market prices to get quick approval. The 2nd Flipper was a French guy who showed up with his calculator and claimed the home needed $70,000 of repair where our own estimates for our in-house investors were only $30,000 which was going for the Small Kitchen Remodel!! Given that this home is only 2,051 sq ft, it was obvious the Frenchmen had no connections and did not know the prices at the Home Depot. The 3rd Wholesaler turned out to be a student of a Than Marill Coaching program which is called Fortune Builders!

Bottom line is that every Tom-Dick-And-Harry can now claim they are Wholesalers since they have purchased a DVD course from these folks that tells them they don’t need to know ANYTHING about Real Estate and they don’t need ANY of their OWN money! These DVDs are painting the over-simplified picture of how anyone can flip Fixer Uppers using Hard Money Lenders. As long as these folks can afford to PAY for the DVD course, these publishing companies are happy.

We discovered later on that some of the SAME Wholesalers have cause massive headaches to sellers in Palo Alto, San Mateo, San Jose and San Francisco markets. My thoughts are that we should at least publish a who-is-who of these Wholesalers to help legitimate buyers have a chance at the super-tight inventory of Homes that are for sale in Silicon Valley.

What do you think?!

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