Shawn -

Sure. It's sometimes called "bird dogging." This typically works with houses needing to be rehabbed. (It can also work on "pretty houses" not needing rehab.) Here's one example.

1. Drive around an area of your town where there are houses in need of repair. They're usually easy to find. I found 20+ in a two hour period.

2. Track down the owners. (This is the hard part.)
Doing one mailing I did, I sent 34 letters. I got one phone call (a 3% response - good in any direct marketing book) and 17 letters returned that the addressees couldn't be found. The next thing to do would be to turn these over to a skip tracer to find out where the owners or the heirs were.

3. Once you have the information on the owners, you can do one of two things:

a. Tie up the house on contract yourself.

b. Relay the information to someone looking to buy houses wholesale.

4. Depending on what you did in #3, you can either collect the finder's fee directly from the other investor or "assign" your contract to them.

Does this work? It's done all the time among real estate investors.

Rick Smith, "The Net Guerrilla"