A cleanout quote turned into a $6,800 fee. I'm not sure how.

Five weeks with a buyer holding at your price is luck and you should treat it as luck. Most of mine walk at three.

The daughter's question was whether it was worth cleaning out at all. That's the part that stayed with me. She was about to pay you to empty a house she was going to give away.

The mechanics you described are standard, so it's worth naming which assumption carried the deal.

You solved for your buyer's number first. That inverts the usual sequence and it removes the estimate that breaks most deals, the after repair value. In a mill town at a $118,000 finished price there may be four usable comps in a year and roughly a dozen states don't publish sale prices at all, so an ARV built off public data there would have been close to fiction. Your buyer's $62,000 wasn't a valuation. It was a bid from someone who intends to do the work, which is a firmer number than anything you'd have modeled. That is the version people call reverse wholesaling.

The $6,800 sits below the national average assignment fee, which a 2025 survey of over a thousand wholesalers put near $13,000, with typical single family deals between $8,000 and $15,000. On a $55,200 contract in a low price market, $6,800 is a wide spread as a percentage. Judge it against the contract price, not the national number.

The title defect is the risk you carried without pricing it. A power of attorney executed years earlier, with a principal who now lacks capacity, is a question of state law and of what the closing attorney will accept, and the answer differs by state. Whether that POA was sufficient was never yours to decide, which is why five weeks passed. Ask who holds title and what authority the signer has on the first conversation, and get an attorney in that state to confirm it before you set a closing date. Whether your activity requires a license also depends on your state, and several states changed those rules in 2025.

$62,000 sight unseen on a full gut with an unverified roof is your buyer taking a real swing. Ask him afterward what he actually found. Hoarded houses hide floor damage under the piles and I've had two where the subfloor in the kitchen was gone entirely.

I'd want to see the assignment agreement and the settlement statement from this one. Specifically whether your $6,800 appeared as a line item that the seller saw, or whether it was handled off the statement. Not because either is automatically wrong. Because when someone eventually asks you what you disclosed, the document is your answer, and how much you were required to disclose depends on the state.

@lantern, do you know which way it was handled?

This is the thread that made me stop worrying about which strategy fits me. You had a lead source nobody else can buy, attorneys and property managers calling you about houses full of stuff. That's better than any list I could build.

Agreed with @kestrel and it's annoying. I've analyzed maybe 200 properties and never once had a seller ask me for a number unprompted.

The five weeks is where I'd have been exposed. If you'd had earnest money hard and the POA never cleared, who eats the deposit? That's a contract question and I'd want the answer written before signing, not discovered.

Your cleanout business is the moat. I'd keep quoting cleanouts and I'd keep saying yes to the cleanout work even when the sale is the better payday, because the day you stop being the junk guy the attorneys stop calling.

@lantern how did you decide your buyer's $62,000 was a real number and not just the first thing he said? Mine tend to quote low on the phone and firm up after they walk it.

So the daughter got $55,200 and a house emptied without paying you to empty it. I've been reading about this for weeks and this is the first example where I could actually follow where every dollar went.

A $118,000 finished value house selling at $55,200 with a gut required. I've owned in towns like that and I don't think she left much on the table, the list would have taken six months and every buyer would have asked for a repair credit she couldn't fund.

Before you do the next one, what does your written contract with the seller look like? You described a phone call and a number. Was there a due diligence window, and was there language letting you assign it? Because from the sound of it your buyer's patience was the only thing holding the deal, and I'd want paper doing that job instead.

I'm partway through licensing and this thread has me rethinking the order. @pike's point about marketing versus a single phone call is exactly the line I've been reading about, and the answer changes by state, which nobody mentions in the courses.