A $9,400 cleanout quote on a house I don't own yet, closing in two weeks

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.

I run a four person crew doing exactly this work, so let me price your job the way I'd price it.

1,900 feet packed in two rooms plus unusable kitchen plus a 30 year garage. I'd walk it and call seven pulls. Around here 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. Crew of four, four days, eight hours, at $32 loaded is $4,096. Add $250 for supplies and a mattress surcharge and I'm at roughly $8,550 in cost. Bidding that at $9,400 is a 9 percent margin. Whoever gave you that number is either very efficient or not making money.

So no, it isn't a go away price. The $6,800 quote with the garage carved out is the go away price.

Doing it yourself with day labor: you'll save the margin, which is a few hundred dollars, and you'll spend four days on site managing people who have never done it. The savings show up if you already own a dump trailer, and you don't.

The thing that would change my answer is whether the floors survived. Under a packed hoard I've found subfloor rot maybe one time in five, and it costs more than the cleanout did. If you can get in before closing, pull back a corner in the worst room and look. If you can't get in, treat the $58k as a guess and decide whether $146k still works if the rehab is $75k.

cobalt's 9 percent margin line is the thing I'd have never guessed. I assumed cleanout companies were printing money because the work is unpleasant. Apparently unpleasant and profitable aren't the same thing.

Are you sure your $255k ARV holds? You said the comps are all cleaner than this, which reads like you're comping a rehabbed house against a rehabbed house, which is correct, but it also means every dollar over $58k comes straight out of your spread. $146 + $58 + say $18k in carry, closing and selling costs puts you at $222k. That's a $33k spread on a house where you can't see the floors.

I'd walk. Not because the cleanout number is wrong, thatch and cobalt both say it isn't, but because you're two weeks from closing on a scope you cannot produce. I've talked myself into worse and it's the reason I still have zero deals.

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

If you're borrowing on this, ask your lender now what they'll do with a rehab budget that has no contractor scope behind it. Hard money desks I've talked to want a line item budget before they'll size the rehab draw, and terms differ by lender, so get it in writing rather than assuming they'll fund $58k on your estimate.

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.