A cleanout quote that turned into a 6,800 wholesale style fee, and what made it work

Five weeks with a buyer holding at your price is luck and it should be treated as luck. Most cleanout to sale timelines walk closer to 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.

Worth seeing the assignment agreement and the settlement statement from this one. Specifically whether the $6,800 appeared as a line item the seller saw, or whether it was handled off the statement. Not because either is automatically wrong. Because when someone eventually asks what was disclosed, the document is the answer, and how much disclosure was required depends on the state. @mikeoconnell7, do you know which way it was handled?

This is the kind of thread that makes strategy choice feel secondary. A lead source nobody else can buy, attorneys and property managers calling about houses full of belongings, beats almost any list that could be built from scratch.

Agreed with @aaron_fitz10 and it's annoying. Across a large sample of analyzed properties, a seller asking for a number unprompted is genuinely rare.

The five weeks is where the exposure sits. If earnest money were hard and the POA never cleared, who eats the deposit? That's a contract question worth having answered in writing before signing, not discovered after.

The cleanout business is the moat here. The right move is to keep quoting cleanouts and keep saying yes to that work even when the sale is the better payday, because the day the operator stops being the junk person, the attorneys stop calling.

@mikeoconnell7 how was the buyer's $62,000 confirmed as a real number rather than the first thing offered on the phone? Buyers in this kind of situation tend to quote low on the phone and firm up only after they walk it.

The daughter got $55,200 and a house emptied without paying to have it emptied. A clean example of where every dollar in a deal like that actually goes.

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 doing the next one, what does the written contract with the seller look like? A phone call and a number were described. Was there a due diligence window, and was there language allowing it to be assigned? From the sound of it, the buyer's patience was the only thing holding the deal together, and paper should be doing that job instead.

I'm partway through licensing and this thread has me rethinking the order. @jordan_ellis2'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.