My partner and I just completed our first successful wholesale deal. After having many offers for houses rejected, we finally put a house under contract that had been vacant for about five years and was going to require a pretty substantial repair bill.
We went into the deal wanting to do a complete rehab and market it to a retail buyer. Even with using a hard money lender, we were still going to have to front repair money and bring money to closing, so we decided to wholesale the property instead.
I think we made all the old mistakes new real estate investors make and even created some new ones. Bottom line is, we had a very patient seller and, thanks to studying this website, we managed to assign our contract for a $10k gross profit. A Realtor purchased the house from us and closed in 24 hours.
The good news is I had lots of calls on the house, and I have developed several contractor and wholesale buyer contacts. Lessons being learned, we have decided to focus on wholesaling real estate in order to generate some cash and tackle the bigger projects later. Thanks for all the good info.