Here's my cost per contract math, tell me what's wrong with it

The $10,000 figure is the part I'd question first. It gets repeated everywhere as the typical assignment fee, and the sources are recruiting and industry sites rather than anything official. A median is not a promise, and yours depends on the price band you're working in.

Your 1% reply rate assumes the messages arrive. Carrier filtering is the whole ballgame with texting and unregistered or badly warmed numbers get blocked in bulk, so you can pay for 10,000 sends and have a fraction delivered. Also, whether you can text those numbers at all depends on consent rules and on state level restrictions, which is a question for a lawyer before you press send rather than after.

One contract is not one closing. Sellers back out, title comes back with a probate issue, an heir in another state won't sign. I'd assume a meaningful share of signed contracts never make it to closing and rerun your number with that haircut.

Nothing in your budget pays anyone to look at the house. Add $100 to $150 per walkthrough and assume you walk three houses for every one you contract.

Also nothing in there for earnest money? I thought that came out of pocket when the seller signs.

rigging, it does, and it usually comes back if you exit inside the inspection window, which is why people don't budget it. It's still cash sitting somewhere for a few weeks. ledger, the line I'd add is repair estimate error. Remote estimates run light almost every time, and a $15k miss on a $10k spread is a dead deal, not a smaller one.

Your skip tracing at $0.10 also assumes good hit rates. On rural absentee owners I'd expect a chunk of records to come back with no usable phone, so you're not really paying $0.10 per contactable person, you're paying more per contactable person than your spreadsheet says.

Your funnel has five stages and each one is a guess. Multiply five optimistic guesses together and you get a number that's off by a lot in one direction. If each stage is only 30% worse than you assumed, one contract becomes roughly one every four months, and your $1,400 becomes $5,600.

girder's point is basically where I've ended up after six months of building models like yours. I stopped trying to predict the funnel and started tracking what it actually costs to get one seller on the phone, because that's the only number in the chain I can measure in week one instead of month four.