A wholesaler wants $8,000 to hand me a rental. Is that a normal thing to pay?

Asking what he has it under contract for is a completely normal question. He didn't answer it because the answer is a number he doesn't want next to his fee.

That doesn't automatically make him a crook. Plenty of people in this business make a spread and never disclose it, and in some states that's fine as long as they're operating as a principal on their own contract. But you asked and he dodged, and that's information about how the rest of the relationship will go.

Run the number before you run the ethics.

$158,000 all in, plus say $3,500 closing costs, call it $161,500. Rent at the website number, $1,325. Taxes, insurance, management at 8%, maintenance and vacancy reserves at say 12% combined. You are landing somewhere near $600 a month of operating expense before debt on a house like that in most markets, so roughly $725 net operating income a month, $8,700 a year, on $161,500. That's a 5.4% unlevered yield.

At his rent number of $1,450 it's about 6.3%. So the entire question of whether this is a good buy sits on a rent figure he gave you and you haven't verified. Pull three actual leased comps, not listed, leased. If it rents for $1,325 you're paying $8,000 to a stranger for a 5.4.

The $500 to hold it is the part I'd stop on. What does the deposit contract say happens if you decline? If there's no written agreement, you are handing cash to someone whose incentive is to keep it. Ask for the hold agreement in writing before the money moves, and if he won't send one, that's your answer without you having to be clever about it.

Fee structure matters more than fee size here. $8,000 as an assignment fee on a house he already controls is one thing. $8,000 as a service fee you pay to have him find and negotiate on your behalf is a different arrangement, with a different set of duties owed to you, and which one you're actually in depends on what the paperwork says rather than what the email says.

@marlow which is he offering? Because right now the email sounds like both at once.

To @lantern's point, the honest sourcing services I've looked at have you sign something first, before they show you anything. Buy box, fee, term, what happens if you pass. This guy showed you a house cold and then asked for money. That's the sequence of a spread deal wearing service language.

Nobody has said the obvious one. You haven't seen the inside. A $150k house that a wholesaler has locked up is frequently a house with a $25k problem, and the photos will be of the kitchen and the yard. Get in with someone who can tell you what the roof and the panel and the sewer line look like before you talk about the fee at all.

@harrow yes. Ask when the panel was last touched and whether it's fuses. On the older housing in the price bands wholesalers work, cast iron drain lines are the one that eats people, and a camera on the main run is a couple hundred dollars against a five figure repair.

One more thing to check and it's cheap. Look up whether your state requires anyone marketing a property they don't own to disclose that they hold an equitable interest, or to hold a license to do it, because several states have added rules like that in the past few years and the details vary a lot state to state. Your state's real estate commission website will say. It won't tell you whether the house is a good buy, it will tell you whether the person selling it to you is operating inside the lines.

Ask him for the assignment agreement he intends to use and read it before you decide anything else. In particular, whether the assignment fee is refundable if title comes back bad, whether your earnest money goes to him or to the title company, and whether he's assigning you a contract that is still valid, because these contracts have expiration dates and I've seen one assigned four days before it died.

$8,000 on a $150,000 house isn't crazy as a number. I've paid similar. I paid it to people who had been sending me deals for two years and whose rent numbers I could check against my own units three streets away. You're paying it to an email address. That's the difference, and it's most of the difference.

The $500 hold would make me walk on its own. Real acquisition services get paid at closing or on a stated retainer with a deliverable attached. A refundable deposit to look at a house is a mechanism for turning your hesitation into their float.

Counterpoint to the pile-on. If the house genuinely nets what @ledger calculated at the real rent number, the fee is just part of the price. You're allowed to buy a 6% yield from someone you find distasteful. What you're not allowed to do is buy it without verifying the rent, and that's the actual open item, not his manners.

@kestrel is right that the fee is just price, and @ledger's spread between 5.4 and 6.3 is the whole decision. I'd add that your exit is priced by owner-occupant buyers, not by yield, so also pull three sold comps within half a mile and see whether $158,000 all in puts you above or below them. If a wholesaler's fee pushes you past retail on the resale comps, you've bought the house at a loss on day one and no rent number saves that.

@marlow don't send the $500.