Wholesaling Intelligence When Terrorism Happens: Ensuring Business Continuity

Nothing tests an investor’s wholesaling intelligence and strategy like a major disaster. You are ready?

This week’s tragic Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent poison letters have been not only sad and horrible, but also a tremendous wake-up call for business owners and, in particular, real estate investors. You create a natural amount of panic about personal safety and family protection, but what about your business, wealth, and income, too?

Even if you weren’t affected this time, America has many enemies. So what if your area is next? You’re covered

Insurance provides little comfort to property owners, and although individual properties can be replaced, their loss will affect the portfolio and may affect income. Fortunately, wholesaling real estate provides an automatic defense mechanism against many threats. If you are simply exchanging properties, you cannot get as stuck with those who own them.

However, an even worse danger is the threat of interrupted income. Unless you can keep your business running and the revenue comes through the door, most will find that it all starts to unravel much faster than they thought possible.

For many, all it takes is for a month of marketing to go to waste, or for a couple of early closings to fail and the bills to pile up as money bleeds out and staff and partners run.

Worse yet, what happens if your office is destroyed, temporarily closed, or your files are lost? The team is one thing. But the data may be priceless. Using external backups and cloud storage with Google Drive or Drop Box can make a big difference during these times and when other more common natural disasters occur.

However, the most important and complicated thing for most and where the true intelligence of wholesaling comes into play is keeping operations running, being able to receive incoming calls, answering leads, and continuing to coordinate closings.

Diversifying your real estate wholesaling business to operate in different areas is a good step. But if your entire staff is in one place, or if you relied only on one landline for your business phone service, you could run into serious trouble as your best-prepared competition moves in to collect your bids and dollars.

To protect your wholesale business, use virtual phone numbers and services that can be instantly redirected in an emergency, and diversify your team member locations or at least have outside staff on call.