$13,000 average fee, $414,000 median price. Which number should a new operator actually plan around?

Question

Costing out a first deal and I keep hitting a mismatch between the two headline figures everyone cites. The 2025 Real Estate Bees survey of over a thousand wholesalers put the national average assignment fee near $13,000, with a spread from about $5,000 in Arizona to roughly $22,000 in North Carolina and Georgia, and standard single family deals landing between $8,000 and $15,000. Meanwhile NAR had the median existing home price at $414,000 in April 2025.

If I plan around the fee average, my model says three deals a year covers my costs and I'm fine. If I plan around the price, it says the houses I can actually get under contract at a wholesale discount in my market are the sub-$250,000 tier, which is exactly where institutional buyers and iBuyers moved downstream and where PropertyRadar says fees have compressed. So the average fee and the price tier I can reach may not describe the same deals.

The other way to read it: the state variation swamps everything. A $5,000 average and a $22,000 average aren't the same business, and quoting a national number to yourself is how you build a plan for a market you don't live in.

And a third reading, which I half believe: neither number matters because your first four deals are training and the only figure worth planning is how many months of cost you can absorb before revenue shows up.

Which of these would you build a first year budget on?

brandonlee36 · Answer

Plan around your own market's numbers and nothing else. I learned this on the rental side. National medians described a country I don't operate in. Pull your county's actual closed cash sales under retail for the last twelve months and count them. If there are fourteen, your fee average is irrelevant because there isn't volume.

nataliehsu · Answer

@thicket how do you pull that if you're in one of the states where sale prices aren't public? I looked into this and roughly a dozen states don't disclose, which seems to kill the whole exercise.

jordan_ellis2 · Answer

@plumb in non-disclosure states you get it from an agent with MLS access or from a title rep who'll run a farm for you. It's slower and less complete. That's part of why fee averages differ so much between states, the data itself is uneven.

joe_delgado5 · Answer

Budget the months, not the fee. My fees have ranged from $4,200 to $19,000 and I could not have predicted a single one in advance. What I could predict was that marketing cost me about $1,900 a month and I needed to survive seven months before the second deal. That number I hit almost exactly.

stephen_ok9 · Answer

The compression point in the sub-$250,000 tier is the one I'd stress. Institutional capital moving into that band means your competition on price has a lower cost of funds than you do. Where they don't compete is heavy rehab and occupied properties with complicated human situations, so your plan should be built around deals they won't touch rather than around an average fee.

derekj19 · Answer

@meridian so the practical version is that the average fee is a number for people already doing this, and a first year budget is really just a runway question.

$13,000 average fee, $414,000 median price. Which number should a new operator actually plan around?

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