Trying to figure out what the first deal costs me and now I'm trying to figure out what joining a network costs too. I've seen a free Discord, a group charging 97 a month, and one guy wanting 2,500 for a "mastermind" that included buyer access. Is there a normal price or am I looking at three different things.
Answer
Three different things, yes.
The free Discord or group chat is the most common form a micro-wholesaler network takes. Members refer deals to each other, ask about a title issue, warn each other about a buyer who backs out. Nobody charges because there's no product, just people who want more of their contracts to close. The cost is your participation. Groups like this thin out fast if you only take.
The 97 a month is usually a paid community with some structure, maybe a shared deal board, a weekly call, sometimes a contract template library. Whether that's worth it depends on whether the members are actually closing, which you find out by asking in the group how many assignments went through last quarter and watching who answers.
The 2,500 mastermind is education being sold with network access attached. Sometimes real, often the buyer list turns out to be a spreadsheet you could rebuild yourself from public records in a month, and in about a dozen states sale prices aren't public at all, which changes how much building your own list costs.
The real startup costs sit outside all of this. Skip tracing runs a few cents to a dollar a lookup. Direct mail is roughly 50 to 80 cents a piece. A CRM to track sellers is 30 to 100 a month. Earnest money on a contract might be 500 or 1,000, and you should assume you can lose it. An attorney to review your assignment contract once, before you use it fifty times, is the best money in the list, and what's allowed in that contract varies by state.