Podcast: How Nathan Payne Built Payneless Flipping on the Wholesaling Method Most Investors Miss
There are a lot of real estate wholesaling coaches on the internet. Most of them sell the same thing: a course, a method, a system, and the promise that you can do a deal in 30 days. Nathan Payne built Payneless Flipping on a different premise. He gets in the trenches and does the deals alongside his students, splitting the profits, bridging the gaps, and staying involved until they no longer need him.
Nathan joined Todd Baldwin on the Everyday Excellence podcast to talk through the philosophy behind Payneless Flipping, the approach to wholesaling that separates him from the crowd, how he teaches students to find their first lead, and what he has learned after eight years of doing deals and four years of coaching. The marketing discussion alone makes this episode worth listening to in full.
From Door-Knocking Missions to Door-to-Door Sales
Nathan grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, and spent two years on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints before he ever thought about business. For two years, he knocked on doors all day and was rejected constantly. He had signed up for it and says it never bothered him. But it did train him for what came next.
After his mission he got into door-to-door sales, working straight commission all the way through college. It was lucrative enough that he paid for his own education doing it. But when he graduated, he did not want to knock doors forever. He started asking what else he could do, and a buddy from college gave him the answer: wholesaling.
His friend had been doing it while they were in school but had since taken a corporate job. When Nathan reached out after graduation, they both decided to jump in together. Nathan stopped knocking doors. His friend quit the corporate role. They went all in on wholesaling with no experience and figured it out from there. That decision, Nathan says, changed the direction of everything.
What Real Estate Investing Actually Means
Most people hear “real estate investing” and picture the Rich Dad Poor Dad model: save up, get a mortgage, buy a rental property, and let the rent cover the payment. Nathan told Todd that this is one approach, but it is only a small part of what real estate investing actually covers as a career.
The broader world includes wholesaling, wholetailing, fix and flip, creative financing, novations, and more. The thread that connects all of it is the same: finding opportunities where the numbers make sense, whether that is a discounted property, an off-market deal, or a situation where the right structure creates profit that a traditional buyer would never see. Traditional real estate, in Nathan’s framing, is going through an agent to buy a home for yourself. Real estate investing is treating the whole asset class as a business.
The Problem With Most Wholesaling Coaching
The coaching space for real estate investing is crowded. Nathan was direct about why he entered it: the way most people learn wholesaling is, in his view, wrong. The standard model is education-heavy and application-light. A coach with hundreds of clients passes students off to assistants, gives them a system, and lets them figure out the hard parts on their own.
“Information doesn’t really help anyone without the application, without actually having someone hold your hand or be there for you,” Nathan said. The result of purely information-based coaching is that most students never do a deal. They have the knowledge but not the support structure to push through the uncomfortable parts.
The other problem Nathan points to is the lowball-offer mentality that most programs teach. The conventional advice is to talk to a seller, make a low offer, and if they say no, move on. It is a volume game, and Nathan thinks it wastes everyone’s time and creates real harm for sellers who think they have a committed buyer when they do not.
Pre-Flipping: The Method That Changes the Offer Dynamic
Nathan calls his approach pre-flipping, and the key distinction from traditional wholesaling is where the buyer research happens in the process. In traditional wholesaling, you make an offer to the seller, get the property under contract, and then go find a buyer. If you cannot find one at the right number, you renegotiate or cancel. Sellers are left waiting and in some cases have turned down other opportunities based on a deal that was never real.
In pre-flipping, Nathan’s team does the buyer research before the offer is finalized. When they identify a motivated seller, rather than making a lowball offer immediately, they step back and use data to find out what buyers have actually paid for properties in that specific area. They call those buyers directly and ask where they would land on a deal like this one. That data tells them what the real market is before they commit.
“Someone will offer $120,000 and then someone will come in and offer $220,000. So it’s really hard for us to gauge what someone will pay because everyone is all over the board.”
This is also what allows Payneless Flipping to put serious earnest money on the table. While most wholesalers offer $500 to $1,000 in refundable earnest money with 7 to 14 days of due diligence to go find a buyer, Nathan’s team has been known to put down $50,000 of non-refundable earnest money with zero days of due diligence. The purchase price may be lower, but the certainty of close is incomparably higher. Sellers pick the offer that feels real over the offer that is theoretically higher but carries all the risk.
What Pre-Flipping Is Not
Nathan was careful to separate this from a strategy often called reverse wholesaling, where an investor identifies a specific buyer first and then goes looking only for properties that match that buyer’s exact criteria. The flaw in reverse wholesaling, he explained, is that it creates dependency on a single buyer who knows you are working exclusively for them, which gives that buyer leverage to lowball their own offer to you.
Pre-flipping uses buyers for market intelligence, not for exclusivity. The goal is to understand what the market will actually bear for a given property, not to lock yourself into one buyer’s preferences before the deal is even found.
The Learn-As-You-Earn Coaching Model
Payneless Flipping runs a year-long program. Students come in at different levels, and the structure accommodates everyone from complete beginners to those who have already tried and failed on their own. Nathan says he prefers working with students who have at least made a call or attempted a deal before joining, because they arrive with realistic expectations rather than social media fantasies.
The deal split works on two levels. If a student identifies a lead and hands it off to Nathan’s team to negotiate, contract, and close, the student receives 30 percent and Payneless Flipping takes 70. If the student gets the property under contract themselves and the team only needs to find the buyer, the student gets 60 percent and Payneless Flipping gets 40. The model incentivizes students to build their own skills over time rather than just generating leads forever.
The program also includes performance coaches who work on mindset and goal-setting alongside the deal skills. Nathan is clear that the mental side of entrepreneurship is not secondary. “As an entrepreneur, you’ve got to stay mentally strong. That’s super big.” Students who are not taking the required actions often need mindset support more than they need another tactic.
Lead Generation for New Real Estate Investors
When a new student comes into Payneless Flipping, Nathan sorts them into one of two lead generation paths depending on their situation.
Pay Per Lead: The Inbound Path
For students who have a budget, Nathan recommends pay-per-lead platforms that deliver motivated seller inquiries. These are sellers who have raised their hand, already expressing that they want to sell, which makes the conversation fundamentally different from a cold outreach call. Inbound leads, Nathan said, are the best quality he has seen across all lead sources. “If you’re going to spend $10,000 on inbound leads versus outbound, like your calling and texting, I would much prefer inbound.” Todd Baldwin, who runs digital marketing campaigns for real estate investors through Everyday Media Group, echoed the sentiment: these are people with a problem actively looking for the solution you provide.
Co-Wholesaling: The Zero-Budget Path
For students who have no marketing budget at all, Nathan teaches a different starting point. Rather than trying to find their own deals with no money, he teaches them to find buyers for deals that other wholesalers already have under contract. Many wholesalers are strong on acquisition but weak on disposition, meaning they have deals they cannot move. Platforms exist specifically for listing these deals, and a student with no budget can get started by connecting those deals to the right buyers.
This approach, called JVing or co-wholesaling, requires zero marketing spend to begin. It builds the buyer network and market knowledge that becomes essential as the student eventually moves into finding their own deals.
The Marketing Consistency Lesson
Nathan made a point that Todd found particularly resonant from a digital marketing perspective. He told Todd about his own mistake early in his wholesaling career: he spent $5,000 to $10,000 on direct mail in a single campaign, got no deals, and stopped. That is not a failure of direct mail. That is a failure of commitment.
“Every marketing channel can be a waste if you don’t do enough of it.”
Real estate marketing channels, like most marketing channels, require pipeline time. The first campaign does not usually produce deals. The tenth campaign, in the same market, with consistent follow-up, starts to build the compound effect that everyone who reads the success stories forgets happened before the success story was possible. Todd reinforced this from the Everyday Media Group side: the worst thing a real estate investor can do is put $5,000 into a campaign expecting two specific deals in 30 days. “If you’re stressing about the money, you’re not ready for inbound marketing.”
What Does Success Look Like Inside Payneless Flipping?
Nathan’s definition of success has shifted over the years he has been coaching. It used to be simple: if a student closes a deal, that is a win. He no longer measures it that way.
“Success is different for everyone. Maybe making that call is success. Getting to that next step or believing in themselves, that’s progress.”
Not every student closes a deal within the program year. Life circumstances, available time, and individual commitment all vary in ways that are outside Nathan’s control. What he focuses on instead is advancement. Did they do something this week they were afraid to do last week? Are they closer to their goal than they were a month ago? The transformation he is most proud of is when a student with a full-time job eventually makes enough from wholesaling to leave that job entirely and do real estate investing as their career. “That’s a win,” he said simply.
AI, Human Connection, and the Future of Real Estate Deals
Todd asked Nathan about AI and got an honest answer: Nathan is not entirely sure where things are headed, and it concerns him. “I don’t know if I’ll be useful in a year. I think it could replace me now.” He was partially joking, partially not.
Both Todd and Nathan landed in the same place, though. Real estate transactions involve trust, relationship, and a seller who is often going through something difficult: a divorce, an inherited property, a financial situation that requires a fast close. The conversations that make deals happen are still, at this moment, fundamentally human ones. Nathan acknowledged that some people will choose to interact entirely through AI-powered processes, and some will insist on a human being. The market will split, and how far is still unknown.
For Nathan, the ethics of the process still matter regardless of what technology sits underneath it. A seller who thinks they have a deal deserves certainty, not a placeholder offer from someone still figuring out if they can close.
The Simple Idea Behind Payneless Flipping
Nathan Payne’s career did not follow a straight line. A church mission in his late teens, commission sales through college, then a full pivot into wholesale real estate with no experience, eight years of deals, and eventually a coaching program built on the idea that teaching someone and doing the deal with them are two very different things.
What came through clearly in his conversation with Todd Baldwin on Everyday Excellence was a consistent philosophy: do enough of anything, do it honestly, stay involved long enough for it to work, and keep realistic expectations at the center of everything. That applies to wholesaling deals, to coaching students, and to any marketing channel a real estate investor is trying to use to build their pipeline.
If you are in real estate investing and trying to build a marketing strategy that generates consistent motivated seller leads, the team at Everyday Media Group works with wholesalers, fix-and-flip operators, and investors at every stage of growth. The conversation starts with understanding what channels are already working and where the gaps are.
Listen to the full episode on Everyday Excellence wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about Payneless Flipping at paynelessflipping.com, including Nathan’s free training and community. For real estate investors looking to build a digital lead generation strategy, visit everydaymediagroup.com.
