A $9,400 cleanout quote on a house that has not closed yet

Two separate decisions are tangled here and they have different answers.

On the price: sanity check it by volume rather than by feel. A 20 yard roll-off holds roughly the contents of three or four furnished rooms of ordinary household goods. A hard packed house plus a full garage plausibly runs six to nine pulls. At $500 to $650 delivered per pull with tonnage overage on top, hauling alone is $3,500 to $5,500 in most metros. A four person crew for four days at a fully loaded $30 an hour is another $3,800. $9,400 is inside the range that the work actually costs. It is not a padded number.

On the deal: your exposure is that you cannot scope the rehab until the contents leave, and you are being asked to close first. That is the part worth pushing on, and it is contract language rather than a price argument. Ask for access to complete the cleanout before closing, at your cost, with a written access agreement and your own liability coverage in place. Sellers refuse this often, and whether it is workable at all depends on your state and on who actually holds title in an estate situation, so run the access agreement past an attorney in that state.

If you cannot get pre-closing access, you are buying a $58k rehab estimate with the walls hidden. Price that uncertainty as a wider contingency, not as a smaller cleanout line. Moving $5,400 out of contingency to pay for the cleanout leaves you with almost nothing for whatever the contents were sitting on top of, and floors under a hoard are frequently gone.

The estate angle matters more than people are saying. If the family walked away but nobody has been appointed to act for the estate, the wholesaler may not have anything assignable yet. I'd want to see who signed the contract before spending another hour on cleanout math.

Take a four person crew doing exactly this kind of work and price the job the way that crew would price it. 1,900 feet packed in two rooms plus unusable kitchen plus a 30 year garage calls for seven pulls on a walkthrough. In a typical market a 20 yard is $545 with 3 tons, $75 a ton over, and a packed household box comes in around 3.5 to 4 tons, so figure $600 real per pull. That's $4,200 in hauling. A crew of four, four days, eight hours, at $32 loaded is $4,096. Add $250 for supplies and a mattress surcharge and total cost lands around $8,550. Bidding that at $9,400 is a 9 percent margin, so whoever gave that number is either very efficient or not making money. So it isn't a go away price. The $6,800 quote with the garage carved out is the go away price. Doing it with day labor instead saves the margin, which is a few hundred dollars, at the cost of four days managing people who have never done it. The savings only show up when a dump trailer is already owned. The thing that would change the answer is whether the floors survived. Under a packed hoard, subfloor rot turns up maybe one time in five, and it costs more than the cleanout did. If access is possible before closing, pull back a corner in the worst room and look. If not, treat the $58k as a guess and decide whether $146k still works if the rehab runs $75k.

A 9 percent margin on a cleanout job is the number most people would never guess. The assumption is usually that cleanout companies are printing money because the work is unpleasant. Unpleasant and profitable turn out not to be the same thing.

Worth stress testing whether a $255k ARV holds when the comps are described as all cleaner than the subject. That's the right way to comp a rehabbed house against rehabbed comps, but it also means every dollar over budget on the cleanout comes straight out of the spread. Take an assignment price of $146k plus a $58k cleanout number plus, say, $18k in carry, closing and selling costs, and the total lands around $222k. Against a $255k ARV that's a $33k spread on a house where the floors haven't even been seen yet.

Walking away is often the right call here. The cleanout number itself is probably accurate, thatch and cobalt both suggest it is, but being two weeks from closing on a scope that can't be produced is the real risk. A scope that can't be nailed down that late is usually a sign to pass.

Ask the wholesaler for a longer inspection period rather than a price cut. Price cuts tend to get refused on reflex. Time gets granted more often because it costs the seller nothing today.

Anyone financing this should ask the lender now what happens with a rehab budget that has no contractor scope behind it. Hard money desks generally want a line item budget before they will size the rehab draw, and terms differ by lender, so getting that answer in writing rather than assuming a number like 58k will fund on estimate alone avoids a bad surprise mid deal.

Windlass, walking away is free and I keep forgetting that. Bramble, one small thing nobody priced: if the family wants anything back out of the house, that's another two weeks and a conversation, and I've watched that stall a closing.