@Raven Conte Good question, and the answer surprises most people. There is no standard percentage. Earnest money is a negotiated term, exactly like the price and the closing date. Nothing in any state form fixes it at a number. What matters more than the amount is where it goes. It goes to the title company or the closing attorney, into escrow. Never to the seller, never to the agent. If anybody ever asks you to hand it straight to them, that is the moment to stop and ask why. Bigger deposits do get used to make an offer look more serious, so on a competitive listing you will see people put more up. That is a choice somebody made, not a rule you have to follow. And here is the part I care about more than the number. Do not settle on what you are putting down by yourself. Whatever you are thinking about committing, bring it to the call before you sign anything, because that money stops being theoretical the second the seller signs.

Raven, one push back and it is the only part I would change. Nothing is set in stone before a contract. Not on any deal, and not for me either. Every number you have before somebody has been inside that house is preliminary. Condition is the biggest variable in the whole thing and it is the one nobody can see from a listing. Comps move. A major road between two subdivisions moves a price more than most people believe. What you actually want before you sign is not certainty. It is a range you can defend, taken on the conservative side of every unknown, and an exit you can name out loud. That is what the daily call is for. Somebody brings the property and we take it apart properly, together, before anybody commits to anything.

@Junior B You answered your own question in your last line and I do not think you noticed it. "I only need to find a few names." Right. So do not buy a skip trace. Do not sign up for REI Skip, do not go hunting for fifty parcels to hit somebody's minimum, and do not spend a dollar on any of this. You are not running a mail campaign to a list. You are trying to reach a handful of people. AND HERE IS WHY THE FREE SITES ARE COMING BACK SCATTERED. You are searching a NAME. Names are common, and those sites will hand you nine men with the same one across four states. Of course it is a mess. Search the ADDRESS instead. Pull the county tax assessor or tax commissioner record on that parcel. Free, public, takes a few minutes. Two things sit on it that none of those websites have. The owner's name exactly as it is recorded, spelling and middle initial and all. And the MAILING address where the tax bill goes, which is very often where the man actually lives and is almost never the vacant land. Now go back to a free people search with a name AND a town AND a street. That is when those sites stop guessing. That is also when Facebook works, because a name plus a town is a person, and a name on its own is a phone book. Get the name and the mailing address and then STOP digging. The record is not the job. The phone call is the job. Do not spend Friday reading deeds. AND ON THE MAIL, YOU WERE RIGHT AND I AM NOT WALKING IT BACK. A cold letter from an unknown Junior in Georgia gets thrown away. You said it yourself and you were correct. But one letter to a man whose tax bill you are looking at, about the specific piece of land he owns, is not that. That is not a campaign, that is a knock on the door in an envelope, and it is your backup for when the phone number will not turn up. Phone first, always. The letter is second string. You have tonight's link. Bring this parcel to the 7 o'clock call and we will put it up out loud. Ten minutes there beats another week of searching.

@Junior B one line on the parcel class, then the thing that actually matters. PARCEL CLASS, SHORT ANSWER. For Landmark you only need the vacant land classes. Agricultural tracts and vacant residential acreage. Leave commercial, industrial and improved residential alone. He told you himself he buys land parcels and combines lots, so anything with a building on it is not his, and anything zoned for a warehouse is a completely different buyer. If a county only offers you broad classes, pick agricultural and vacant, then sort by acreage and let the 5 acre floor do the filtering for you. Do not try to make the search page perfect. It never will be. NOW THE PART I AM NOT GOING TO SOFTEN. On August 14, Landmark put his buy box in writing. Counties, acreage, what he combines. That was three weeks ago. On August 20, you found three parcels in Bryan County that fit it. Since then you and I have gone through water and sewer maps, manhole depths, state delegated engineers, sales search date ranges, skip trace pricing, and now parcel classes. Every one of those was a fair question and I answered every one of them. And in three weeks, not one owner of those three parcels has heard your voice. That is not a knock on your work rate. You are the hardest working person on this feed and I have said so more than once in public. It is a warning about where the work is going. A search page cannot tell you no. A landowner can. That is exactly why the search page feels safer, and it is why people stay on it for months and call it progress. THIS WEEKEND. TWO THINGS, NOTHING ELSE. One. Take the three Bryan County parcels you already have. Pull the recorded owner name and the tax mailing address off the county record for each one, the way we did on Wednesday. Name and address only, then close the laptop. Two. Get one of those three owners on the phone. If the phone will not come, one letter to the tax mailing address. One owner. Not three, not thirty.

You too Bernita. Enjoy it. And if you get a quiet hour Saturday morning, that is the best time in the whole week to call an agent. Nobody else is calling them then.

@Ervin Diggs "Trying to get one to stick." Ervin, that sentence tells me you are actually making offers, which already puts you ahead of most of this thread. Offers not sticking is almost always one of three things, and in Wilson it is usually the second one. ONE. Not enough of them. If you are making two or three offers a month, nothing is going to stick. This is a numbers business. Ten offers where one lands beats two offers you agonized over. TWO, and this is the Wilson one. You are offering on the wrong houses. A house that has been listed nine days is not going to take your number, and no amount of good scripting changes that. The seller has not suffered yet. Go find the ones sitting 90, 120, 180 days with two price cuts already on them. Those sellers have been told no by the whole market and you are the first person in months who called. THREE. You are explaining instead of asking. If you find yourself justifying your number, stop. Give the number, say it is what the property supports for you, then be quiet. Here is your week. In Wilson, sort by days on market, longest first, and pull every single one over 90 days. Wilson is small so that list will be short, which is good, it means you can call all of them. Then call the listing agent on every one and open with this. "I saw it has been on a while. What is the story on this one?" Then say nothing and let him talk. The story is where the deal is. How many offers have you put out so far? Tell me the number and I will tell you whether it is a volume problem or a targeting problem.

@Hakeem Joseph I am going to give you a better answer than a title rep's phone number, because I do not think you need one yet. YOU DO NOT NEED A DOUBLE CLOSE. YOU HAVE AN ASSIGNMENT. You told me you used my contract. That contract has "and or assigns" in the buyer line, which means the right to buy that house is already yours to hand to somebody else. One page, one signature, no funding, no second closing, and it costs you nothing. A double close is two separate closings. You buy it, then you sell it, an hour apart. That means two sets of closing costs out of your pocket, plus a transactional funding fee for money you hold for sixty minutes. Every dollar of that comes out of what you were going to make. There is exactly one honest reason to ever double close, and it is that a buyer refuses to see what you are making on the assignment. That is a problem you solve WHEN a buyer says it, not before you have one. SO HERE IS THE ORDER, AND IT IS THE OPPOSITE OF WHERE YOU ARE STANDING. Buyer first. Then how it closes. The closing method is the last decision in a wholesale deal and it is the one everybody wants to make first, because lining up title reps and funding feels like progress and calling buyers feels like rejection. Right now you are under contract with nobody standing behind you. A title company cannot fix that. A buyer can. AND DO NOT SPEND A DOLLAR ON ANY OF THIS YET. No transactional funding, no fees, nothing. Money going out is a decision that comes to the call first, same as the contract did. Bring it to the room and we will look at the whole thing together, out loud. YOUR FIFTEEN MINUTES TONIGHT. Facebook, search groups for Scranton real estate investors, Northeast PA real estate investors, Lackawanna County investors. Join three. Post four lines. No address, no photos. "Northeast PA. I have a 3 bed 2 bath under contract in the Blakely area. Cash buyers only, closing inside 30 days. Who wants the details?" Then answer whoever raises their hand. The first man who asks you what you need for it is the reason the title question ever gets to matter.

@Jimmy Mosby you are right, and I want to sharpen it, because gathering information first is exactly what separates the people who close from the people who circle. The question is WHICH information, and where it lives. Most of it is not in a spreadsheet or a database. Price, taxes, square footage, comps, days on market. All of that is public, any of us can pull it in ten minutes, and none of it has ever changed a deal. The information that decides the deal is what the seller is trying to accomplish, and it exists in exactly one place. His mouth. You cannot research it, you cannot buy it, and nobody has ever found it sitting on a listing. So gathering information first is right. Just make the FIRST piece of it the conversation, not the comps. Ask what he is trying to accomplish, then go do the homework knowing what you are solving for. Do it in the other order and you spend an hour building a beautiful number for a man who was never really selling. @Emma Bassiri that is the same thing I said to you about motivation, except said better, and said by somebody who has actually been out there doing it. Jimmy, real question since you have been at this a while. On a brand new lead, what is the first thing you go find out?

@Aldo Chandra you just wrote the sentence this whole thread has been circling. NEEDS TO SELL VERSUS WANTS TO SELL. That gap is the deal. Everything else on the page is arithmetic. And here is the part most people never reach, because they never ask. You can find that gap out loud, and it takes one question. What happens to you if this does not sell. Then stop talking. Whatever comes out of that silence is the only piece of information in the entire transaction that is not public. Price, taxes, square footage, days on market, anybody can pull those in ten minutes. Nobody can pull the answer to that question except the person standing in front of the seller. And passing on the clean one because the story did not add up is the harder half of what you described. Most people cannot walk away from a spreadsheet that agrees with them.