Sharon Vornholt is the owner of Innovative Property Solutions in Louisville, KY. She has been investing in real estate since 1998 and has been a full time wholesaler since 2008.
Sharon is the creator of the Louisville Gals Real Estate Blog and the popular podcast “Let’s Talk Real Estate Investing”. She is also a mentor and a coach who loves teaching others how to succeed in this business.
How she got her start
Sharon’s dad was a contractor that used to drag her to a lot of different job sites. She owned and operated a house inspection company for 17 years.
She then attended a Real Estate Investor Association meeting and learned about flipping houses. She then started rehabbing. Her initial plan was to rehab and get big chunks of money to buy rental properties with. That worked for a while, but then the market changed….big time.
Wholesaling houses
In 2008, she found it difficult to sell houses (as did everybody across the country). This is when she found out how awesome wholesaling was. She decided to try and sell a house she was going to rehab to another investor and see if she could make money quickly, without doing any fix up.
She’s been wholesaling ever since.
In this episode, Sharon talks about the differences between an assignment of contract and a double-close. The gist is that assigning a contract involves getting a house under contract and then selling the contract (as well as the obligation to close on the contract) to another investor for a fee.
Double-closing involves a little more complexity. Not much though. There are two transactions with a double-close. You have a A B transaction where the seller of the house sells the house to you as the buyer. Then you have a B C transaction where you are the seller and the investor that is buying the house ‘as-is’ from you is the buyer. he funding from the sale from you to the end buyer goes to fund the first transaction between you and the seller of the house.
For many people considering wholesaling houses, the fear of not being to find a buyer and not be able to close the deal if they can’t find a buyer scares them from ever getting started. Sharon shares how she allows for an ‘out’ by using escape clauses. During the show, we went over three good escape clauses that included: ‘subject to accepted inspected’, ‘subject to partner approval’, and ‘subject to funding approval’.