Take a simple version. Purchase 200,000, cosmetic work 25,000, resale target 275,000. A short-term renovation lender will typically want 10 to 20 percent of the purchase from the borrower and will fund the repair budget in stages after the work is done, so the borrower pays for each phase and then gets reimbursed. On that deal you're looking at 20,000 to 40,000 down, 4,000 to 6,000 in buy-side closing costs and points, and enough cash to float the first draw and the monthly carry. Carry on a house like that runs somewhere around 1,500 to 2,500 a month once you add interest, taxes, insurance and utilities.
So the working number is usually 50,000 to 70,000 of real cash for a 200,000 purchase, and I'd want a reserve on top of that for the two months the house sits unsold. Loan terms and draw schedules move around, so get the draw process and the reserve requirement in writing from the specific lender rather than trusting a general figure.
On tools, the common spend is a comp and valuation subscription in the 50 to 100 a month range, a list building or skip tracing service anywhere from 100 to 400 depending on volume, and a project tracking tool that many people replace with a shared spreadsheet at zero cost. MLS access through a licensed agent partner is the cheap version of good data.
The expense nobody budgets is the deals you don't win. Marketing to find one off-market house can run several thousand before anything closes, and that money is spent whether you buy or not.
