what software am I actually supposed to be paying for

The one I'd actually spend on is a comps tool with real photos, because your buyer is going to argue about ARV and repair scope and you need to see interior condition of the comps. I've watched a match fall apart over 15k of scope nobody priced. Everything else you can fake with a spreadsheet for a while.

Nobody mentions the boring one, which is your document set. Buy the assignment addendum and the purchase agreement from an attorney in your state once, a few hundred dollars, and stop pulling forms off the internet. I've read enough wholesale contracts to say most of the free ones have an assignment clause that contradicts the rest of the document. Recording and disclosure rules differ by state too, so a Texas form doing work in Illinois is a problem waiting.

Spreadsheet is fine at eleven buyers. You'll know when it isn't.

I'm building services around this and the tool people underrate is a shared calendar plus a notes field per buyer. Not glamorous. But the thing that makes reverse wholesaling work is remembering that buyer number 6 said no houses on busy roads and buyer number 9 will take a busy road at a 12k discount. That's a text field, not a subscription.

Dialer only matters once you're calling sellers at volume. At eleven buyers you're having conversations, not running a phone room.

Six months in and I've paid for three things and dropped two. Skip tracing I kept, roughly 15 to 25 cents a lookup on the pay as you go plans I saw. A CRM at $99 a month I dropped because I was inventing work to justify it. A driving for dollars app I dropped because I wasn't driving.

The $500 a month claim is usually from someone selling part of the $500.

What's skip tracing? I thought if you're doing it in this order you get the address from the buyer's criteria and then just look up who owns it at the county. Is skip tracing the part where you find their phone number?

Yes, rigging, skip tracing is finding contact info for an owner you've identified. County gives you the name and mailing address, skip tracing gives you a phone.

Bramble, on your actual question, the thing I'd add is title. Get a title company or attorney who has done assignments before and knows how your state handles the transfer, and call them before you're under contract, not after. That's a relationship, not software, and it costs nothing until closing. Half my early friction was a closer who didn't understand what an assignment fee was on the settlement statement.

I'd spend money in this order: attorney-drafted forms, a comps subscription, skip tracing credits. Everything above that is optional until you have more matches than hours.

But I want to push on the premise a bit. You said you don't need a seller list tool because you already know what you're hunting. Knowing the criteria doesn't hand you the addresses. If your buyer wants 1965+ three bedrooms in four zip codes, you still need a way to pull every property matching that and filter for distress signals, and doing that off raw county data by hand is slow enough that it becomes the bottleneck. That's what the list tool is for. It's a search, not a mailing list.

Eleven buyers is more than most people have, honestly. I'd be spending the next stretch getting five of them to give you the criteria in writing rather than shopping for tools.