Hey, it's Terry Norton.

Welcome to the Wholesale Hotline podcast and the Flipping Mastery Breakout.

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So when I got started in 2004, really at that point in time, the only method that was available that anybody really ever did was driving for dollars and door knocking.

So that's what I did.

And then very quickly, the real estate game transitioned into the REO game.

The banks had everything because the market in Detroit started to decline in 05,

06, then the crash in 07. By the time 2008 came around, everything was a bank owned property.

Like all the opportunities was those. And at the time, they don't do it quite this way as much now.

At the time, when the banks foreclosed on properties, they gave those

to REO listing agents. So these were listing agents that had these specific contracts with the banks,

and they would get all those listings. And so if you wanted to buy a bank property, you did it

through an agent. And then that's when I developed and started doing the double-dip strategy. I would go directly to the listing agent, let them dual represent the deal. I'd get my offer in there. I started to build relationships. They started to bring me deals. We couldn't lock it up off market because they had the list them. What would happen is we already had the deal in the bag. It would go active at 10 a.m. And it'd be pending at 10.01 because they already had my offering and submitted and approved.

It was more of a formality.

Sure.

So I very quickly transitioned from like driving around knocking doors to becoming very, very dependent on the agent business model.

And doing thousands of REOs like that, working with thousands of agents,

that became my like number one go-to strategy for many years, was direct to agent.

So I was one of the first ones to kind of introduce that idea that you can wholesale agent

deals. Now since then, there's been, you know, a lot of people that are really good at and

there's a lot of education around it. But I kind of was the first one to sort of pioneer that idea. Maybe I was the first one to do it, but I was the first one certainly to teach about how to do that. And, you know, I have a student, you know him really well, Hugh Boy, I broke down his 2025 business, like his numbers. Brent, get this. He did 1.7 million gross in 2025 at an 82% profit

margin. I know. It's insane because he's got no cost. There's no cost to direct the agent. It's free.

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