What a private lender actually prices on a wholesale assignment intake call

A useful way to understand how private capital actually evaluates a wholesale assignment is to look at a typical intake call between a short term lender and a flipper buying an assignment with a nine day close. Almost none of a call like this is about the house itself. A couple of minutes cover the ARV and scope. The rest, often twenty minutes or more, covers who the wholesaler is: whether the lender has funded a deal from this assignor before, whether the assignment fee is showing on the settlement statement or handled off to the side, whether the earnest money sits in an escrow account or in the wholesaler's operating account, and whether the contract has already been assigned once or twice before reaching this buyer. Lenders who do this regularly tend to keep a short list of assignors they will fund behind without much friction, and a much longer list where diligence adds a week. Same borrower, same house, different name on the assignment, different timeline. The fee amount itself often matters less than whether it is disclosed and appears on the statement. What a careful lender will not do is fund into a chain where the flow of who got paid is unclear. The reframe worth taking from this is that an assignment fee is not just a number negotiated between wholesaler and buyer. It is also a number the buyer's lender has an opinion about, and a wholesaler with a clean, disclosed paper trail is worth more to that buyer than one offering a slightly lower fee with an opaque chain.