Drop me in a new city and tell me to buy a good real estate deal in less than 3 hours. Here is what I would do.

The gurus will tell you to do a bunch of marketing and make lots of offers on houses. But you want to find a deal fast, so the first thing I would do is find the local real estate wholesaler.

Not just any wholesaler, because in a large market there will probably be several and that is where you are investing. What you should look for is the Big dog wholesaler, the one who is selling more properties than anyone else. Look for somebody who is buying and selling 5-10 properties a month. That would be a true wholesaler.

A true wholesaler marks up a deal a few thousand dollars and moves on to the next deal, nothing like many courses and real estate gurus talking of making 10, 20 or even 50k on a deal. These are not true wholesalers, they are flippers.

Flippers make home runs. They find a property and mark it up quite a lot and make a killing one deal. These will be the guys that do only one or two deals a month.

The true wholesalers will only make a little on each deal and therefore will have investors buying from them over and over again because they know they are getting the best deals.

I am one of the big dog wholesalers in my area and, after thinking about how I do business, I realized that before I became a wholesaler I spent lots of time and money learning how to find deals. It does pay off if you want to be a wholesaler. But if you are just trying to flip a deal or build a rental portfolio it really does not make sense. In my opinion, devoting a lot of time and money to find real estate deals in this case would be a waste of time. You simply will not be able to find better deals than me.

Use the local wholesaler if you want to find great deals super fast. It is like having a buyer on your staff that is doing all the legwork for you. By using their expertise you will save time and money that is more than worth the mark up you will pay.

Where do you go to buy something at lower a price? Wal-Mart, Target, all of the similar stores are large wholesalers. They buy in bulk and then pass the savings on to the consumer. In your real estate investing the local wholesaler does the same for you.