Did anyone actually model the garage premium before they bought, or did you just assume it added value

The 11-day DOM gap is probably real but I would not hang too much on it because the dollar translation is where it gets messy. On performing notes I have bought in Ohio-adjacent markets, the collateral appraisals have been coming in with garage adjustments in the $8k to $12k range at that price band, which sounds meaningful until you realize the buyer pool at $140k to $190k is often FHA and they are not negotiating on garage, they are negotiating on inspection items and seller concessions. So the garage might be filtering the pool at the search stage without ever showing up cleanly in the sale price, which is basically what you are describing, and I think that distinction is the right one to be making.

The Akron duplex is harder to read from the outside. You said the comp pool made you uncomfortable, but comps without garages were selling, just at a softer number. That is actually usable data. If the no-garage comps are clustering $10k to $15k below the clean ones, and the ask was already pricing as if it had a garage, that is a specific problem with the ask, not a structural liquidity problem with the asset class. What I would want to know is whether you could have gotten to a number where the no-garage comp pool still worked for your exit, or whether the seller was too far off on price for that conversation to even start. Because those are different situations and I think you might be conflating them a little.

The distinction you are drawing between price effect and liquidity effect is the right one to make, and it matters more than most people realize before they have tried to exit a position under time pressure.

A days-on-market gap, what you are describing as how long a listing sits before going under contract, can mean two different things. It can mean buyers will pay less for a garage-free home, so the price adjusts down until demand appears. Or it can mean buyers who need a garage simply skip the listing entirely and move on, which shrinks your buyer pool without necessarily moving the price. In a thin market like a $140k to $190k price band in Dayton or Akron, a smaller buyer pool is a liquidity problem. If you need to sell in 36 months and a recession or a rate spike has already compressed demand, you want every qualified buyer looking at your property, not just the ones who will settle.

On whether you weighted the garage absence correctly in Akron: I cannot say, because the answer depends on numbers I do not have. The question is whether the seller's ask already reflected the comp discount. If the garage-free comps were trading at, say, $148k and the ask was $162k with no adjustment, you were right to be uncomfortable. If the ask was already at $148k and the deal still did not work, the garage may have been a symptom of something else.

You named that possibility yourself at the end of your post. That kind of self-examination is worth taking seriously. It is worth separating the two things: was the garage a genuine underwriting concern, or was it doing the work of a concern you had not fully named yet?

To model this cleanly, you would need at least six to eight closed comps in the same zip code, split by garage presence, same approximate square footage and condition. A local appraiser familiar with that submarket could tell you whether lenders are applying a formal line-item adjustment or treating it as an overall market condition.

What did the comps without garages actually close at relative to the ask on the Akron property?

The distinction you drew between price effect and liquidity effect is the right one, and most people collapse them when they should not.

In a price band like $140k to $190k, the garage is frequently a filter criterion rather than a negotiating variable. A buyer at that price point in Dayton or Akron is often using an online search with garage checked, which means a no-garage listing does not get suppressed in negotiation, it gets suppressed in the results feed. That is a pool problem, and a smaller buyer pool in a 36-month exit window is a different underwriting input than a 5 to 8 percent value discount.

The assumption doing the most work in your Akron underwriting is not whether garages add value. It is what your exit buyer pool actually looks like in that price band at resale. If 60 to 70 percent of qualified buyers in that range filter by garage before they ever see your listing, your liquidity calculus changes materially even if a cash buyer would pay full freight.

The risk you did not name directly: you said the spread died "partly" because of the comp pool, and then at the end you wondered whether you were using the garage as cover for other problems you did not want to name. That is worth sitting with before you underwrite the next one. If the block was actually soft, or the rent-to-value ratio was already thin, or you were uncertain about the rehab scope, those are independent variables that compound the garage problem rather than substitute for it. Conflating them produces a pass for the wrong reason, which means you might approve the same deal with a garage added and still own the real problem.

On your wholesaler's number: 11 days DOM gap is meaningful if it is consistent across price bands and property types, but I would ask him whether the gap holds on properties that actually traded or whether it includes listings that expired and reset.

What does the rent-to-value look like on no-garage duplexes in that Akron submarket relative to the ones with a single attached?