A four month wholesaling test, run with real money, ending short
Underwriting experience does not automatically transfer to running a wholesaling operation, and a bounded test with a real budget and a stop date is the way to find out. Say the budget is 14,000 across mail, skip tracing, a dialer, and a part time caller at 9 dollars an hour, over four months in one metro, targeting houses between 180,000 and 260,000 finished value. A plausible outcome: two contracts, one closes for a 4,100 dollar fee, one dies and takes 5,000 in hard earnest money with it. Net against marketing spend, the result lands around a 6,900 dollar loss, not counting hours worked. Where the dead contract tends to go wrong. An ARV set at 242,000 using three closed comps within half a mile, all within 90 days, two of them with finished basements the subject property lacks, adjusted by 9,000 for the difference because that is what the pattern suggests. A repair estimate of 38,000 from a contractor walkthrough. A contract at 172,000, leaving what looks like a 23,000 dollar buyer margin at an assignment price of 181,000. Then every buyer approached comes back between 164,000 and 169,000. None of them argue with the ARV. All of them argue with the basement adjustment and with the 38,000 repair number, some quoting 52,000 instead. The spread was never really there. Earnest money goes hard on day 15 because the seller will not sign otherwise and the deal feels worth pushing for. An additional pressure in a market like this: the under 250,000 tier often has institutional money active in it too, showing up as competing cash offers on the best leads within a week of a mailer landing. The fix that would have mattered most: get a buyer's number on the repair scope before earnest money goes hard, not after. Internally consistent underwriting still fails when it is priced off the wrong repair figure, and a single phone call on day 10 would have surfaced that for free.
