A house closed by a seller who had owned it for forty minutes

Ha. I found out a different way. I was walking a flip I'd just bought and the roofer told me he'd already been through it two weeks earlier with "the other guy who bought it." Same house, same estimate, he still had the photos on his phone. Wholesaler had priced his exit off my roofer's number before I ever saw the listing.

The part worth chasing down is the order of the two deeds. In a double close there are two conveyances that have to land in the right sequence, seller to the middle party first, middle party to the end buyer second, and the middle party's ownership only exists in the gap between them. Recording practice and how quickly the register acts on it vary by state, so it's worth asking the closer in writing how they handle sequencing and whether both instruments go out in the same batch. Not a hypothetical concern, that gap is where title problems live.

A comparable structure shows up on four unit deals, and the difference that matters is whether the middle party tells the buyer up front. Say the middle party says, "I'm buying it at nine, selling to you at nine forty, my funding costs me about six grand for the day." That kind of disclosure tends to earn goodwill even when the buyer still closes at the higher price.

@tylerbrooks9 did the estate know? That's the part worth circling back to. A sale at one number, a same-day resale at a higher one, and nobody at either table seeing the other statement.

Wait, he owned it for forty minutes. I didn't know that was a thing you could do.

I've done six of these. The spread reads bigger than it lives. On a low six figure house you're paying two sets of closing costs plus the day rate on transactional funding, and where I operate the transfer tax hits twice, which people forget until the statement prints. My last one showed twenty two thousand of gross spread and I kept a bit under thirteen. Still better than the assignment version, because the assignment version was going to be a conversation about my fee that I'd lose.

Forty minutes of ownership and zero maintenance calls, which has to be the cleanest landlord run anyone here is going to report.

Worth saying for anyone reading who plans to go verify this on their own deals: prices are not public everywhere. Roughly a dozen states do not disclose sale prices at all, so in those you would see the two deeds and never the two numbers. @tylerbrooks9 happened to be in a state that prints it.

The funding wire is the whole story on these. I had one where my funder wanted written confirmation the B side was clear to close before releasing, and the B buyer's lender wouldn't issue anything past 2pm on a Friday. We sat in a conference room until the two closers worked out an order they'd both sign off on. Made about nine grand and aged four years.

The middle party's number matters less than most people expect. If the rent and the capex line still support the exit at the price on the signed contract, the spread belongs to somebody else. The question that deserves attention is who touched title in between and whether the policy covers it.

@samantha_ruiz when you say the assignment version was a conversation you would lose, is that mostly buyer psychology? Is the fee being visible the problem more than the size of it?

Sorry, basic question, but where does the money for the first closing come from if he doesn't have it? Someone lends it to him for one day?

The closer's face is the best detail in this whole post.

@tylerbrooks9 a spread like that is only interesting if it tells you something you didn't already know about the property. In a case like this, the buyer underwrote at their own price with a tenant in place and a known roof age. If the earlier number implies the house was available lower and the buyer paid more, the real question is whether the buyer could have sourced it at that lower number, and usually the answer is no, because they weren't the one talking to the estate. That's the whole trade. What's actually worth knowing is the other party's hold cost on the day. A few thousand dollars of hold cost against a spread like that leaves room to keep doing this kind of flip; a much larger hold cost usually means it isn't repeatable.

Closers hate the two file day. Two sets of wires, two sets of signers, one address, and everything has to hit in order. Half of them won't take the work at all, and the ones who will have a process they can recite. Ask which one is on the file before setting a date.

In a market where a thirty one thousand spread would be a third of the purchase price, that kind of gap is much harder to hide successfully. The double closing method often stops penciling once both sets of closing costs are counted.

@aaron_fitz10 to your question about the fee being visible, there's a second reason people take title instead. Marketing a contract you don't own is what draws the licensing question in a lot of states, and buying and reselling as the actual owner changes the shape of what you're doing. How that lands depends entirely on your state's statute and you'd need a real estate attorney there to tell you, not a forum. I'm mid licensing course and it's the single thing my instructor is most careful about phrasing.