Three grand a house from one buyer every month, or twelve grand once and back to hunting

The thing I would want priced is the promise, not the fee. Four a month is their acquisition pace, and the share of that they will actually take from you is the whole decision. If they have two other people feeding them, your three a month is one a month. Ask them how many wholesalers currently bring them deals and how many closed with them last quarter.

The trade you are describing is the standard one in this model, and it turns on a single number: the count of deals they actually absorb from you per month, not the count they buy overall.

Run it as a per-hour figure. At 10,500 average and five weeks of re-selling per deal, put your hours on paper, including the near death you had to nurse. Then do the same at 3,000 with no buyer search, no proof of funds chase and a fourteen day close. The flat-fee arrangement wins on hours per dollar at three deals a month and loses badly at one. Everything hangs on which it is, and you cannot know from their side of the table until you have run a quarter.

Typical beginner assignment fees run roughly 2,000 to 10,000, with experienced operators reaching 20,000 to 50,000 on deeply discounted deals, so 3,000 sits at the bottom of the ordinary range. That is the price of the certainty. Institutional and semi-institutional buyers pay that way because the order flow is the product they are buying from you.

Two things to get in writing before you agree. First, whether the flat fee is a cap or a floor, because a cap means you eat every unusually wide spread you find. Second, whether they will hold the number for a defined period, so a change of buy box does not arrive as a change of price. Assignment fee terms, disclosure obligations and what you may advertise all vary by state, so have a licensed attorney in your state read the arrangement before you sign it.

I am still building my list so take this as an outsider's read. A flat 3,000 sounds like it also solves a problem you did not list, which is that you stop needing to keep twenty buyers warm. That is hours too. Right now I spend most of my week on the list itself, and I already resent it.

I signed a version of this and would do it again with one change. Mine was a flat 4,000 with a buy and hold group and it did what it promised for five months, roughly two to three a month, which was more money than my one-off year. Then their box moved two counties over and my pipeline was worthless in a week because I had let every flipper relationship go cold. Keep feeding two or three one-off buyers even when you do not need them. Treat it as insurance you pay for in hours.

Starting from nothing here, so the 3,000 with a known buyer looks enormously more learnable to me. You would find out fast whether you can source, and you would not be learning sourcing and selling at once. Is there a reason a beginner should not want the flat deal even at a worse fee?

@ember I think the reason is that you never learn to negotiate a fee, and that skill is what gets you from 3,000 to 14,000 later. @flint has already learned it, which is why the choice is a real choice for him and not for us.

Six months in with zero closed, and the line that stuck out to me is that they have never retraded anybody. That is worth money on its own. Every horror story I have read in this room ends with a buyer knocking 8,000 off two days before closing. If the flat fee buys a buyer who does not do that, the effective gap between 3,000 and 10,500 is smaller than it looks on paper.

What do they do with the houses after? That is the part I would ask about. We took over a portfolio from a group that bought fast on flat fees and then dumped anything with a bad roof back on the market within ninety days. If they are churning, the four a month pace is temporary and your flat fee outlives their appetite.

Ask what funds their purchases and whether it has a draw limit or a facility that renews. A group buying four a month off a revolving line stops on a dime when the line hits its cap, and you would be the last to know. Fourteen day closes off a proof of funds letter usually mean a facility rather than cash sitting idle. Confirm what they tell you with something in writing.

The flat number, and I would sign for a year. Repeat orders compound in ways one-off fees never do.

Worth remembering the flat fee math changes completely at low price points. Where I work a 3,000 assignment is a big fee against a 60,000 purchase, and a buyer who will take everything in that band is close to the only buyer. You have the luxury of a 14,000 comparison. Some of us are choosing between 3,000 and nothing.

What would change my vote is @meridian's question answered honestly. Everything else in this thread is a preference. The deals-per-month figure is the only fact, and you can get most of the way to it by asking their title company how many closings they ran for that buyer last quarter and how many different assignors were on them.