“I think in any business, especially the way the world is going right now, the middleman is the person who makes the most money,” Max Maxwell said on the BiggerPockets podcast.
Today, he makes more than $100,000 per month doing just that—matching buyer with seller—in the real estate market. But he wasn’t born a multi-millionaire wholesaler.
The son of immigrant parents from Jamaica, Max modeled his hard-working family starting at an early age. He worked at a tree farm and poured concrete in the summers when school was out. Then, at 17, he joined the United States Air Force.
After four years he decided getting shot at for $20 grand wasn’t really that fun. So he got out and dove head-first into real estate. This was around 2004/2005. Max got licensed as a broker. A year and half of that taught him that wasn’t cool either.
Next, he opened up a property management investment company, and enjoyed that much more. Basically, he was wholesaling houses without knowing it. Everything was fine and dandy till the market crashed, taking Max’s lavish lifestyle along with it.
After he hit rock bottom—and his car was repo’d—he got out of real estate altogether. This was around 2008. Max ended up moving to California to sleep on his cousin’s couch. He then got a job doing “experiential marketing” for big companies like Verizon and Hershey’s.
That gig opened Max’s eyes to a bottleneck. These mega companies needed brand ambassadors to work big events like state fairs and college football games, but hiring the talent was slow and tedious. So he created an app, once again acting as a middleman, to connect the two.
Only, $90k into it, Max ran out of money, couldn’t secure any additional funding, and the project crashed and burned. At age 30, Max was forced to move back home and live with his mom.
A random conversation with his friend’s father, who happened to be into wholesaling, made Max wanna give real estate one more shot. So he went to good ol’ YouTube University (as in, watched free YouTube videos on wholesaling homes) and got his “degree.”
It was humble beginnings. Max would drive for dollars, cold call up to 200 people per day, and work obnoxious hours. Eventually he got his first deal for $14k in profit. Now it was real. Max kept grinding, getting more deals. His income grew, but after a while, he knew he needed help to hit the next level.
Max began creating systems, hiring virtual assistants and delegating whatever he wasn’t good at or didn’t enjoy. The business continued to grow and Max used the extra time he now had to get online and launch his personal brand, à la Gary Vee, who Max had always looked up to.
Today, on top of wholesaling, Max makes money through ad revenue, partnerships and sponsorships, hosting real estate investing conferences, developing software, and more. His dream is to one day scale his company to a billion dollar valuation.
He’s well on his way. Multiple websites list Max Maxwell’s net worth at around $5 million dollars. For more on Max, here’s the interview I was referring to earlier.
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