Pricing cleanout on 41 addresses I haven't walked: per house from photos, or one flat allowance?

The shed thing is what gets me. Every set of REO photos I've looked at is eight interior shots and one from the curb. Nothing of the garage, nothing of the basement stairs, and no idea whether the attic has forty years of boxes in it. If half your variance lives in the spaces nobody photographs, does a per-house estimate actually get you accuracy, or just a more detailed version of the same guess?

On the management side I flat-rate everything by unit type because turnover is repeatable. A two bed vacate looks like the last two bed vacate about 80 percent of the time, and the average all-in cost of a turn lands somewhere near $1,750 anyway once you add cleaning and paint touchup. Distressed acquisitions aren't like that. My spread on turnover cleaning is maybe 30 percent between best and worst case. Bramble, your spread on 41 foreclosures is going to be 10x, empty ranch to a house with a decade of belongings in it. Flat allowances work where variance is narrow.

I'll tell you what your allowance number does to a bidder, since I'm the one who has to actually go do it. If you ask me for a fixed price off photos, I load the price for what I can't see, because I've eaten that difference too many times. So you'll get quotes that look like your $2,800 flat number even on the empty ones.

What I run instead is a base for the visible scope plus a per-yard rate above a stated volume, with the walkthrough count controlling. On a house that photographed at 12 yards and came out at 21, you'd have paid the base plus nine yards. That's the honest allocation of who eats the unknown.

For your side of it: use the flat allowance to decide whether to make the offer, then get a real number during your inspection window and use it to renegotiate or walk. The allowance isn't a budget. It's a screen.

thatch, when you write it that way, who counts the yards? If I'm the buyer and you're the crew, we're both looking at the same pile and I've got every reason to see 14 and you've got every reason to see 18.

Flat number. If you're sending 40 offers you're not going to sit and estimate 40 photo sets, you'll just stop sending offers.

Yards is the wrong unit for half of these anyway. A garage of clothes and cardboard is volume. A basement with plaster, tile, and a couple of cast iron rads is weight, and the transfer station bills you on weight. I've seen a 15 yard load come off the scale at 4.5 tons because somebody demoed a bathroom into it. If your allowance is built in yards you'll get surprised on any house where the previous owner started a project and stopped.

I stopped pricing this per house. I carry a cleanout reserve across the portfolio and refill it monthly, because averaged over the year my number is stable even though no single property matches it. Last twelve months I spent a bit under $19k across nine turnovers and two acquisitions, which is about $1,700 a door annualized on the rentals and the two acquisitions ate a third of it between them.

That only works once you have enough properties for the average to mean something. Bramble, at your stage you're buying one house at a time, and a bad surprise on house one is your whole margin. Averaging doesn't help you yet.

Numbers from my side so you can sanity check whatever allowance you pick. Three of us for a day is $1,150 in labor to the client, plus disposal, plus $95 if we have to bring the trailer twice. A standard vacated three bed with contents is a day and a half and two loads, so call it $2,400 to $3,000 all in depending on the tip fee, and that's without carpet or appliances. Hoarder conditions double the days and add PPE and sometimes a bin swap, so $6,000 is not unusual.

So your $2,800 flat is a fair median for occupied-and-left houses and roughly triple what a truly empty one costs. If more than half your list is empty you're going to price yourself out of clean deals.

cobalt, does anybody on your side quote from photos and hold to it, or is everyone doing base plus per yard like thatch? Trying to work out whether photo bidding is a real market or a thing investors ask for and nobody honors.

This thread is useful from the other direction. If investors buying lists want one number per house before they walk it, the crew that can produce a fast, defensible photo estimate wins the relationship even if the number gets trued up later. I'd rather be the vendor who says "$2,400 for what I can see, plus $55 a yard past 14, count taken together on site" than the one who says "can't quote without seeing it." Bramble, would you actually pay for a paid pre-offer estimate, like $150 a house, or is that instantly too expensive at 41 addresses?

lantern, $150 times 41 is $6,150 to price a list where he'll buy maybe three. That math doesn't work for him. It works on the servicer side, where somebody is paying for property condition reports on inventory anyway.

If any of these are going on a rehab loan, check how your lender treats cleanout before you set the allowance. Some treat it as part of the funded scope and reimburse on draw, some call it a soft cost and won't fund it at all, which means it comes out of your cash on day one whatever your spreadsheet says. Get that in writing from the lender before you commit to a number, because it changes the timing of the money even when the total is the same.

Everything in this thread assumes a transfer station you can get to. Where I buy, nearest one that takes mixed household is 38 miles, open four days a week, and closed by 2pm Saturday. Two round trips is most of a day of truck time before anyone lifts anything. My flat allowance is higher than yours and it's mostly windshield time, not labor.

Separate line item you're going to want in the same spreadsheet: what you're allowed to do with the belongings. Abandoned personal property rules differ by state and sometimes by whether the former occupant was an owner or a tenant, and in some places you owe notice and a storage period before anything goes in the bin, which turns a one day job into a scheduled one. That's a question for a local attorney on your specific facts, and it belongs in the allowance because storage and haul-and-hold cost money that photos will never show you.

warrant's point is the one that would have blindsided me. Bramble, if a house on your list still has occupants or their things and you're on the hook for a notice period, your cleanout allowance isn't the binding constraint, your calendar is.

I'd carry both numbers and use them for different decisions. Flat allowance to screen, so you can move on 41 addresses without drowning. Then a per-house number after the walkthrough that has to clear before you release contingencies. What I'd add is a hard reserve on top, because the tail is what kills people. cobalt's $6,000 hoarder case is maybe one in ten houses on a distressed list, so 10 percent of $6,000 is $600 a house of expected tail on top of the median. Build that in and your flat number is closer to $3,400 than $2,800, and the clean ones get cheap enough that you can win a couple.