How to Talk to Real Estate Agents: My Script for Real Estate Wholesaling Deals

Whenever I call up a real estate agent about a wholesale deal, there's three things that I'm trying to keep in the front of my mind that I kind of want to portray to them.

Number one is confidence.

Confidence

I want to exude confidence and make them feel like I know what I'm doing, even if I may not be exactly sure of every little step in the journey.

That's my approach.

I think that when you exude confidence, people naturally believe in you.

When you speak like you know what you're doing, people assume you know what you're doing.

I'm actually going to show you guys one of the calls that I did with an agent to get this confidence across.

And remember, I'm making like 5 to 15 calls to agents every single day.

So I'm getting a lot of practice. And the best way to get good at this is to just do it. To just pick up the phone and call.

I might put together like a script of what I say for you guys.

And so first, I want the agent to have some belief in me.

Assigning the Contract to my Partners

And then the second thing is, for wholesale deals I want to let them know that I'm going to be working with partners and may assign the contract to them.

So what I say when I'm on the call is "me and my partners" or "we" or I just never say "I" or that I'm gonna be the only one doing it.

On top of that, I actually put specific wording that I got from a real estate lawyer in the contract so that I don't have any worries that every deal I'm doing every contract I get is assignable to my end buyer.

And I'm going to show you guys exactly the wording that I use and what that offer sheet looks like, but that's number two. They've got to be aware that I'm working with partners and that this contract will probably be assigned.

Property Information

The third thing, and this is something that's been super helpful to me for getting more offers out the door, is I try to get as much information about the property, the sellers, and the neighborhood as I can get out of the agent. 

This is so that I don't actually have to physically go walk through the property in order to make an offer.

The reason why is because when you're wholesaling, you're going to need to get properties at a really significant discount in order for it to make sense.

In order for you to earn your fee by assigning it to an investor who then flips it by putting tens of thousands of dollars into it and makes a profit, you're gonna have to get properties way below market value.

Which means that most of your offers are gonna be rejected because they're just gonna come in so low.

Because of this, I've decided to follow the advice of other wholesalers that "you should only go out to a property ideally once you have a signed contract on it."

Or, if maybe you're just getting started like me, once you know that you might be in the ballpark of offering something that the seller is likely to accept.

For example, if you're $100,000 off of the asking price and they want $200k but you want to pay $100k, it probably doesn't make sense to go walk through that property.

And that's something you want to know before you ever leave your house, so you can put your attention on a better property that's more likely to be a deal for you.

An Actual Conversation with a Real Estate Agent: A simple sript for real estate Wholesaling deals

It makes it easier to be confident when you're talking to a real estate agent because they're usually always happy to get your call.

Now I do get some agents that are grumpy, but they're working on a commission basis so the more deals they do the more they get paid.

And for the most part, most of them answer their phone excited to talk to you and possibly do some business with you.

When I was cold calling after going driving for dollars, most of the homeowners that I was cold calling never answered their phone and never called me back.

The ones that did answer their phone often hung up on me, told me that they weren't interested in selling, or cussed me out.

That's something I'm not gonna have to deal with when I call a real estate agent because they're a business professional and they're not gonna cuss you out because you're asking about homes that are already for sale.

Here's the actual conversation from a recent call I had with a real estate agent.

 Lili: Hi there, I was calling about a listing. I got this number off your listing.

Agent: Do you know what the address is?

Lili: Yes it's 5338. Looks like it might be a fixer-upper.

Agent: Yeah, that just went on today.

Lili: I saw. Have you gotten a lot of calls about it yet?

Agent: We have had a few.

Lili: Okay. Well, I'm an investor and there's a few of us investors who try to act quick on these these fixer-uppers. So, I was just wondering what you might be able to tell me about it?

Agent: It is 2,818 square feet. It's $140k, so it's $49 per square foot, which is crazy. Do you have an email? I can email you the disclosures on it if you'd like.

Lili: I would love that if you could email me the disclosures and a CMA maybe that'd be super helpful okay what's your email.

Agent: I will text you my contact okay and send you just anything I can on the house, and then I'll send you a CMA for the neighborhood.

Lili: Okay and have you have you been inside the house?

Agent: You know, I literally have not been in the house. We just listed it yesterday.

Lili: Is there anything that you could tell me about it? Just let you know, the way that we we are investing it's myself and two other partners. And we don't have an agent on the team. So we like to just work directly with the listing agent, that way we cut down on communication issues and then you can get the six percent with us. So do you have any insights for us in terms of if you know anything about structural issues, or roof, how old it is, just anything like that?

Agent: You know, that will all be on the disclosure.

Lili: Okay great, I'll read that over.

Agent: Yeah it should all be on here and I will just send that over to you, and then I don't think there's any other documents with the house. So I'll send that to you and you can look that over and I'll send the CMA with it also. How about that?

Lili: Yeah that would be great. I'm gonna run some numbers right now just on my end and then I'll kind of cross-reference with your CMA, and I would love to get you an offer this afternoon.

Agent: Okay sure, would you like to see it?

Lili: Well, let me run some numbers and see how close to list price I can be. Which will probably be pretty close with what you guys are asking. Because it's priced so well, I would love to just submit an offer and and see what we can do and then go from there. just so we don't slow things up trying to schedule an appointment.

Agent: Okay are you going to be financed, or are you paying cash?

Lili: It will be cash.

Agent: Okay well let me get this stuff over to you.

Lili: Awesome, thank you. We'll talk soon.

Agent: You're welcome. All right bye-bye.

Key Takeways

Notice how I did a couple of things.

First, I told them that I'm a real estate investor, and I asked what the story is to try to figure out what they could tell me about the house or about the owners.

Second, I also asked for a CMA, and basically tells me all of the homes that are for sale, pending to be sold, or sold within a certain distance around the house that we're talking about.

A CMA isn't what I depend on to find the ARV of the property, but the CMA does serve two purposes.

I can double check it once I run my own numbers and see if I'm accurate to what's happening on the CMA. And it tells the agent that I'm gonna make my offer based on what other things in the neighborhood have sold for.

So asking for the CMA just makes it seem like you know a little bit more about what you're doing and you're really kind of dialing in to what home values are in that particular area.

Third, I also mentioned that I had partners who would be working on this deal with me.

And then finally, I offered the agent the opportunity to double dip on this deal and get a six percent commission with me.

What that means is that they have a contract with the homeowner to sell the house on their behalf, and because of that they get three percent for being the seller's agent.

Normally, another real estate agent would come in with their client and they'd get three percent for being the buyer's agent.

This is why you want to call the seller's agent directly, because if you offer them the opportunity to be both the seller's agent and your buyer's agent on this particular deal, now they're able to make six percent commission.

Which means that they'd make double selling this house to you than they would selling it to someone else who's using a buyer's agent.

Doing this has made agents be much more enthusiastic about my deal and has gotten agents to give me access to listings that aren't even on the MLS, aren't even showing up on Zillow or Redfin yet because they want to give me first crack at that deal because then they can make six percent on it.

Also, they oftentimes are going to ask when you want to come make an appointment.

And again we want to avoid going out to houses just to see them before we actually run the numbers and see how realistic our offer might be.

So I like to say that I'm going to run some numbers, see how close to list price I might be, and then maybe even move quickly.

That kind of sets them up to know that I might make an offer before coming out to see it, and just let them know that I do know what I'm doing.

Now the second thing I like to keep in mind is that even though I've already told her I have partners, there's going to be some things that I need to include when I make the offer so that down the road I won't have any problem assigning this property for a fee to the end buyer.

And it has wording that I got from a real estate lawyer that I paid for using my first YouTube monetization check.

Yeah I'm gonna do an entire video on all the things that I talked about with that lawyer, but one of the things he did tell me to include was this phrasing right here, "Seller understands that buyer may assign this contract to a buyer-owned or buyer-related entity." 

And he assured me that buyer-owned or buyer-related just meant that I had the freedom to assign this contract to anybody that I knew and wanted to assign it to.

So when I submit the offer sheet and it has that wording on there, the real estate agent is going to put that wording into the contract with the seller and everybody's going to be aware that: one, I do have partners, which I told them on the very first call, and then two, that this contract may be assigned to one of those partners at closing 

A must for me is that before I get off the phone with that agent for the first time I have to get enough information to determine if this is going to be a light, average, or heavy rehab. 

Now unfortunately, the agent that you guys saw in the call hadn't actually been inside the house yet, and so she didn't know much about the property and told me that most of the information would be on the disclosures.

By the way, disclosures are what the seller fills out when they go to sell the house, which is basically "do you know how old the roof is, do you know of any plumbing issues, do you know of any issues with the house?"

Sometimes they're honest, sometimes they're not, and so I always like to ask the agent because if they have been in the house they might give me more information. Just take notes and get as much details as you can.

One thing that I didn't ask this agent for and I should have is "What are the outer bounds of this neighborhood, or where should I keep my comps to?"

This is because I'm gonna be looking for comparable houses. If it's a three bedroom, two bath, 1500 square feet, I want to look at other three bedroom, two baths, 1500 square feet in that area or in that neighborhood.

Think about it this way: "If somebody was going to buy my house, what other houses would they also be looking at?"

They're probably not going to be looking at a house that's 20 minutes away. They're probably going to be looking in that specific neighborhood, maybe because they want to stay in that school district or it's close to work or whatever.

And so you should ask the agent, and I didn't do it on this one but I've gotten in the habit of doing it more recently and it makes it so much easier to run comps.

They'll tell you something like, "Stay between these two streets and east of whatever."

So that's another really important thing that I'll put on the scripts to remind you guys to ask when you're calling agents.