How does a 55/45 JV wholesale split work when one side holds the seller and the other brings the buyer

19 days to close once the contract was signed, or 19 days total from first contact with the buyer?

Sutro Street is a solid pocket, curious what condition that four-bedroom was actually in.

Six weeks from first conversation to signed contract is the part worth pushing on a little. Where a landlord relationship is long and comfortable, the seller side timeline usually runs closer to ten to twelve weeks, because those sellers move slowly on purpose. They trust the buyer, which also means they feel no urgency. A six week close in that setting usually means the landlord had already been thinking about exiting, rather than the process itself being fast. The $31,500 spread on a $218,500 exit is the number to scrutinize. That works out to about 14.4 percent, and in the Reno-Sparks corridor over the last eighteen months end buyers have been pricing tighter than that, closer to ten to eleven percent spread tolerance before they start renegotiating at the finish line. A buyer already warmed up from November is probably what held the number together. A cold buyer in that same pocket might well have pushed back to $212,000, which would leave something closer to $25,000 to split. The pre-warmed relationship is more than a convenience; it is likely where three or four thousand dollars of the $17,300 actually came from.

The $31,500 spread is the number I'd push on a little. Reno has been compressing. I've been watching assignments in that 89502/89503 corridor pretty closely for about eight months and the realistic spread on a four-bed in that price range has been running $19k to $24k lately, not $31,500. Not saying yours is wrong, the November buyer connection probably meant she didn't shop around hard, which is exactly how you hold a spread that size. A warmed buyer who trusts the source isn't going to run comps the same way a cold buyer does.

The one-page JV agreement and Evergreen handling it clean is the part I'm actually filing away. I've been overthinking the legal scaffolding on a structure like this, convinced I needed something more elaborate before I'd be protected. One page and a title company that's seen it before is apparently the real answer. I've had a seller relationship sitting with a landlord I've done work for in Sparks since early 2023, three units, keeps talking about offloading at least one, and I have been waiting until I had a buyer network that doesn't exist yet. Reading this I'm realizing I have exactly one side of a deal and that is probably enough to start making calls.

That maintenance relationship being the actual deal source is the part that stands out to me. I've been doing trades work for years and I always looked at the landlords I work for as just clients, never as a pipeline, but you essentially converted a service relationship into an off-market deal nobody else had a shot at.

What did that first conversation with the landlord actually sound like? Like did you pitch him or did he bring it up?