The ARV assumption carrying an unseen-interior bid is almost always six to nine months stale by the time someone closes and lists.
A deal worth studying: a trustee sale bid built on comps pulled the week the default notice filed. The buyer modeled ARV at 310k, which looked reasonable against three sales in the same corridor. Close took four months. By the time the property was listed, two of those three comps had been replaced in the MLS history by a cluster of sales averaging 287k, and the third had been flagged as a distressed transfer. The appraiser defending a future exit or refi will pull the two most recent arms-length sales, and both of those now live below the model. The 23k swing did not come from bad renovation math or a missed repair item. It came from treating ARV as a fact rather than a corridor estimate with a time stamp on it. A bid priced to a 310k exit that actually clears at 285k after carrying costs is often the difference between a thin margin and a negative one, and the number that moved was the one nobody stress-tested. Running the deal at ARV minus eight percent and adding a month to the hold is not pessimism, it is what the comp selection process at appraisal actually looks like. What's the age of the comps you're building your current bids on, and are any of them in a sub-corridor where sales have thinned out since the default notice filed?
