My Wholesaling Business Dropped By 36% in 2025: Here’s What Happened
Ever have a drop-off in your business and you can’t figure out why?
This year was a shock. After four years of continued growth, my wholesaling business dropped 40% in revenue. I’ll break down the forensics of why it happened, what I learned, and how we’re turning it around.
A Little Background
Over the past few years, I’ve gone from being an introverted full-time artist to having closed over 150 deals and made over $1.5 million in revenue—primarily wholesaling land, but also some houses, subject-to deals, and owner financing mixed in. I’ve had a team of as many as eight, and currently we’re at five people.
The Numbers: A Steady Rise, Then a Crash
This year was our first year that we’ve gone down in revenue. It’s been a steady upward arc since we started:
- 2021: 15 deals closed
- 2022: 23 deals closed
- 2023: 48 deals closed
- 2024: 44 deals closed (fewer deals, but higher per-deal average = more revenue)
- 2025: 28 deals closed (a 40% drop in revenue)
So what happened?
Why My Business Dropped Off: The Main Factors
I’ve been digging into our CRM and KPIs trying to figure this out. Here are the factors that affected us this year:
1. Worry Over Legislation
We’re in North Carolina, and there’s a house bill that passed the house and moved to the Senate—basically putting a clamp on wholesaling. It had the potential to pass in October (it got postponed, but we didn’t know that).
In the spring, second quarter, we started pivoting to other markets to cover our bases. We went into Ohio and Florida, did about two months of marketing effort, and so far we’ve got one closed deal out of that.
That’s a huge speed bump. Normally we’re just doing North Carolina, North Carolina, North Carolina. All of a sudden we went into new markets with learning curves, and we’ve closed one deal so far on two months’ worth of marketing dollars and effort.
2. Fishing the Pond Dry
With North Carolina land—and even pivoting to houses—we hit our counties so frequently that we couldn’t talk to them anymore. They knew our text guy by name. “Lucky, why are you texting us?”
We had to switch into houses because of fishing the pond dry with land. That was a learning curve for the team. Lower response rate with houses, more competition. That was a factor in knocking us down some.
3. Failed Direct Mail Campaign
We thought, “Let’s pivot to direct mail because we can hit people in a way we’re not hitting them with text marketing.” We did a new type of mailer we hadn’t tried before—which was a mistake in my opinion—and we ended up getting no closed deals from that campaign to date.
That was $4,000 in marketing spend. We’d had really good success with direct mail historically, but this one was a fail.
4. Failure to Recognize the Downward Trend and Take Action Earlier
We corrected course by the fourth quarter, and those results will show in Q1 of next year. But Q3 and Q4 were very painful.
I fired four people. Cut the hours of other team members. We’ve had unpaid management salaries for me and my brother for months on end. We even took on an overpriced credit line, and we had a balloon payment due with one of our sellers that we had to negotiate an extension on.
That was all pretty painful, and it was just because we were not recognizing this trend early enough and really aggressively taking action on it. We did eventually take action, but we should have let team members go earlier and corrected course on our list management and marketing efforts sooner. Hindsight.
5. List Rotation System
We had fits and starts with our list rotation because we’d used up all the data in our counties for land in North Carolina. Our response rate was going through the floor at 2-3%.
We tried different strategies—going into other states, marketing for houses. But I think our rotation of our list could have been done better. I outsourced that, and I probably should have stayed on top of it because I think there’s still a good list rotation system even with 20 counties where we can get good results.
Take the time and effort. Get AI to help you rotate your list properly. That’s what I’m going to be doing this first quarter.
6. Facebook Marketplace
This was a dispo strategy we used a lot our first two to three years (2021-2024). Facebook Marketplace was good for us for finding individual buyers for vacant land and mobile home lots—properties a builder might not want, but an individual buyer will. You can often get a higher price for them and sell them on owner financing.
Both me and my brother had our accounts frozen as far as using Facebook Marketplace or buy-and-sell groups. When Facebook shut us down, that put a crimp in our dispo hose, and that definitely affected us.
7. Poor Hiring and Delayed Firing
Hire slowly, fire quickly. I’ve been guilty of hiring too quickly and firing too slowly.
Acquisitions guy: We hired someone who was bilingual and would help serve our Spanish-speaking clients, but he wasn’t a good worker. We let him go on for months and should have cut him after 30 days. It goes back to not paying enough attention to KPIs for performance.
Operations manager: We hired someone who didn’t have the right skillset to make an impact on our bottom line. He was with us for a year—one of the highest-paid people on staff—and the revenue drop-off coincided with his tenure. He was managing the rotation component of our business. I’m the leader, so I’m responsible. I did not recognize poor performance early enough and make changes.
Admin/acquisitions cold caller: Underperformer. I allowed this person to be managed by another team member and allowed them to make the decision on whether they stayed or went. I probably should have stepped in and let them go. We spent money on them for three or four months full-time.
Dispositions hire: Talked a really good game, gave a great interview, got past five people on our team, and was a terrible performer. We kept them for two months when they should have been with us for two weeks.
Bookkeeping service: Terrible. We should have fired them much earlier. We kept them on for the better part of a year. The one silver lining is they refunded our money because they recognized the bookkeeper assigned to us was terrible. But we wasted 10-12 months of time and energy.
Long-term employee: We let go someone who’d been with us for two years and had probably been underperforming for at least a year to a year and a half. Also padding their hours, which we didn’t realize until later. I kept them out of loyalty because I’m a loyal person. I like to give people a chance. But I need to be better at letting people go.
Which Was the Biggest Factor?
Going too far afield from what’s always been our bread and butter: vacant land in North Carolina.
This cost us three or four months of productivity by going into other markets and focusing attention on houses, which was a learning curve for the team.
Our average productivity per month historically was four closed deals and $36K in revenue. That’s roughly $140K that we lost. If we’d just stayed the course with what we’d done the prior two years, we would have been roughly on track.
I was trying to grow, so I hired people and went in different directions. It was a failed experiment, and it cost us.
I’m not going to totally beat myself up because we did close some deals on houses and gained new skills in analyzing, offering, and dispoing houses. We built up some team muscles there. But it was still costly.
The second biggest factor would be trying to grow too fast without a clear game plan. Too much transition happening with the pivots to other states and expanding into doing more houses while hiring and training people at the same time.
I needed to either hire more highly qualified people or stay with the team I had and distribute the responsibility among them—which is what we ended up doing after I fired a bunch of people. I went from eight people down to five, and the five is much more effective.
What I Learned
Hiring is challenging and not to be taken lightly
We did a multi-stage interview process. Candidates talked to multiple team members. We still hired some duds. People are always going to put on their best face when they’re trying to get a job and feed their family. It doesn’t mean they’re good.
Going with your gut and hiring people you like who have good energy is not a reliable hiring strategy—even though it’s been my hiring strategy a lot. It has worked for me some, and on others, it has not.
For me as the leader of the company, I should have final say on all hiring decisions until or unless I have somebody I trust to make those decisions well.
Fire people fast
There’s a saying in business: hire slowly, fire quickly. There’s a reason for that. It’s an energy drain and a productivity drain to keep people around out of loyalty or hope that they’re going to turn it around.
Once someone’s shown you who they are, the likelihood of them turning it around is pretty slim from my experience.
Developing new markets takes time and research
It’s not to be taken lightly. There’s infrastructure too:
- Get phone numbers for that market so people feel more trustful
- Build title company or attorney relationships
- File as a foreign entity for your LLC if you’re going to do deals there
- Learn the markets, values, and unique situations (zoning, planning, regulations)
This all takes time.
The Positives
I always like to stay on a positive tip, so let’s distill some positives out of this challenging year:
My team rallied and pulled together. We finished the year strong with 12 contracts in December and four to five properties in escrow to close in January. Everyone had an opportunity to step up and do more than maybe they thought they could—diversify and broaden their skills. That’s a win.
We revamped our acquisitions and dispositions departments. They’re more effective, and we’re getting better results. We added a multi-offer strategy to acquisitions, and we started wholetail.
We added MLS for dispositions. This has been a big help—another way to sell properties and get more eyes on them.
We had a $92,000 month in April. That’s proof of what we can do. Let’s get more of those.
We cut our expenses from about $36,000 a month down into the low $20,000s. That’s a huge cut—about 40%, which was about the drop-off in our revenue. If we can get back to where our revenue was, we’re adding profit. It sets the table for us to be even more profitable in 2026.
Final Thoughts
The setback is just an opportunity for a comeback.
Don’t put a period where God put a comma.
Until next time, keep the faith and keep taking action. It is a numbers game. You got this.
More Real Estate Investing Content:
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- Check out my podcast, Cool Wholesaling and Land Deals – Real Talk on Real Estate Investing on YouTube, spotify, and apple Podcasts
- If you liked this post, you may like this one too: Real Talk on a Tough Real Estate Deal
- Free resource: Grab my multi offer calculator —helps you generate wholesale, wholetail, subject-to, and owner financing offers fast