The buyer's contractor came in 19k higher than the number holding my price

I'm new to all of this, so this is a basic question. You went out at 137k, does the buyer see the 118k you're paying, or just the 137k? I can't work out where the fee sits from the buyer's side.

How was the 60/40 documented? I ask because splits that reflect a contribution other than money are the ones that get renegotiated at the table.

Your partner did his half of the work and then some, and the fee shrank by 4k. Did that 4k come off both shares in proportion, or did you eat it, or did he? On my reading you went from 11,400 to 9,000 and he went from 7,600 to 6,000, which is proportional, so somebody thought about it beforehand or you're both reasonable people. Worth writing down which of those it was, because the next partner may not be the second one.

The mechanism worth naming here is that a credible scope narrows the buyer's risk premium. A cash buyer pricing an unknown scope adds a contingency for what they can't see, and on a 1970s house with a known plumbing problem that contingency is large. Your line by line scope with your own labor rates removed part of that unknown, which is why 137k was arguable at all. The 19k spread wasn't supported by the comps alone.

The assumption your outcome rests on is your presence at the walkthrough. A spreadsheet from an unknown wholesaler moves nothing, because every buyer has been handed an optimistic repair number. You in a crawlspace pointing at drain lines you'd already inspected is evidence. That is not transferable to a partner reading your numbers off a page, so if you scale this, the walk is the part you'd have to keep doing yourself.

On the split, 60/40 in favor of the acquisition side is defensible when that side also supplies the scope, and the convention closer to 50/50 assumes the dispo partner carries the harder half. Yours held at 60/40 through a price cut, which suggests the terms were clear before the deal went live.

One caution on the scope itself. Whether you can produce written repair estimates for a property you don't own, and whether doing that for a buyer touches contractor licensing, depends on your state and on how the estimate is presented. Ask an attorney licensed where you work before you make written scopes a standard part of your offering.

If that buyer hadn't come back you'd have had a 118k contract, a plumbing problem and a seller with a clock. What was your fallback, and how many days did you have left on the contract when the 71k number landed?

I run thin and this is the scenario that eats me. One buyer, one number, and the whole spread depends on convincing his contractor he's wrong. It worked here. I'd want two buyers walking it the same week before I felt good about a 19k ask.

The 60/40 is the part I'm taking with me, since I've got two JV offers sitting in front of me and I've been treating 50/50 as the only number that exists. You had a contribution that could be priced, so you priced it.