Guide · Marketing
Every wholesaling law in the country turns on one distinction. You hold a contract — a piece of paper giving you the right to buy. You do not hold the house. Marketing your contract interest, as a principal, is the lawful core of wholesaling. Marketing the house — its photos, its address, its price, as if it were yours to sell — is brokerage, and brokerage without a license is the violation.
In Kentucky, Nebraska and Oklahoma, even marketing the contract is broker work if you do it publicly — posts, groups, signs, listings, blasts. Private offers to a buyers list you built are the remaining path. South Carolina's Real Estate Commission goes furthest: its November 2024 advisory opinion counts photos, the address, bed/bath counts, condition details, and even verbal descriptions as 'marketing,' and calls compliant contract-only marketing 'practically impossible.'
New York has no wholesaling statute, but RPL § 442-e(3) gives any aggrieved person a private right to recover up to 4 times what you received if you crossed into unlicensed brokerage. No regulator needs to knock first — the seller's lawyer does it.
Private, public, or the property itself — the verdict changes with the answer.
A say-this / never-say-this sheet for every tier, including the states where the channel — not the words — is the violation.
Included in the $49 Compliant Path Kit