The Problem: An Offer With No Numbers Behind It
You get a seller on the phone. The conversation is going well and you don't want to lose the deal, so you offer a number that feels reasonable—maybe something you heard another wholesaler quote in that area, maybe a percentage off whatever the seller mentioned. You get it signed and go looking for a buyer.
Then the buyer runs their own math and comes back under your contract price. There's no spread. You either go back to the seller to renegotiate from a weak position, or you walk and the contract was free work.
The mistake isn't a bad estimate. It's offering a number you can't defend. Price and repair costs aren't guesses in this business—they're the product of a calculation that both the seller side and the buyer side depend on. Get the calculation right and you're negotiating from the same ground the buyer stands on.
Most wholesalers skip the front-end work. They don't study the market buyers are active in, and they never work out how those buyers are calculating a number in that specific area. They jump straight to making offers and learn the math by losing deals. The cost is real: a deal you correctly decline costs you an hour. A deal you take at the wrong number costs you weeks and your credibility with the buyer you pitched it to.
How to Read a Property's Value
Which method you use depends on what you're holding, because the three property types don't value the same way.
Single-family. Start with comps—comparables, meaning properties nearby with similar characteristics and size that have recently sold. Same bed and bath count, similar square footage, same condition tier, as close as you can get geographically. Comps give you a market value for a property in the condition it's in now.
Single-family needing work. Use ARV, the after-repair value: what the property is worth once the repairs are done. You get it by comping against renovated properties, not distressed ones, then subtracting your repair budget to work back to a present-day number. ARV is a projection, which is exactly why repair cost accuracy matters so much—an ARV with a soft repair estimate underneath it isn't a number, it's a hope.
Land and infill lots. Work backward from the finished product. Find a property nearby with similar square footage that recently sold, and take a percentage of it. The land is typically around 20 percent of that number, often lower. This is why land is its own skill: you're not valuing what's there, you're valuing what can be built on it.
The 70 Percent Rule
Once your comps are in, the common rule of thumb is 70 percent: a buyer pays roughly 70 percent of the ARV, minus repairs. That's where your offer comes from.
Here's how it works in practice. Take the ARV, multiply by 0.70, subtract the repair budget, then subtract your assignment fee. What's left is your maximum offer to the seller. Many buyers adjust that percentage up or down depending on how hot the market is and how fast they expect to resell, so treat 70 percent as a starting point, not a law.
What this means for your next move: get the numbers right and you close more deals, because you stop writing contracts that can't be assigned. You also build real confidence. Once you have the buyer side locked down too, you can see how many transactions in that area are actually available to you.
Why What Buyers Paid Beats What Comps Say
Everyone agrees comps matter. Here's the argument that they're secondary: a comp is an estimate of what the market might pay. What a buyer actually paid is what that buyer did pay, in that area, recently. One is a model. The other is an outcome.
Comps tell you what a property is worth in general. They don't tell you that the most active investor in that ZIP has been buying at a consistent discount to those comps for the last year, which is the number that determines whether your deal assigns. Two properties can comp identically, and if one sits in a submarket where buyers are paying under the comp and the other doesn't, those are different deals.
It isn't obvious to reach for the buyer's number first. It feels backward—valuation is supposed to come before the buyer. But the buyer's recent purchases are the most direct evidence you can get of what will clear in that area, and they're available before you make an offer.
The wrong approach: guess at it, or offer high to win the seller and figure the buyer out later.
The right approach: look up what the buyers in that area have recently paid for properties like yours, use that as your ceiling, work the 70 percent rule and your repair budget back from it, and make the seller an offer you can defend to everyone in the chain.
The payoff is faster, easier, and fails less often. Fewer dead contracts. Fewer renegotiations with sellers. Fewer buyers who stop taking your calls because the last three deals you sent were priced where nobody could use them.
Building Your Number From the Buyer Side
The real skill is knowing what a buyer will pay before you pick up the phone—and knowing how they arrived at it. That's two different things. The number tells you whether a deal fits. The method tells you how their number will move when the property is a little different from the last one they bought. Together they let you walk into a buyer conversation already aligned with their underwriting, which is how relationships with repeat buyers get built. You stop being someone who sends deals and become someone whose deals are worth opening.
Before you put a number on a property, check these five things:
Recent comparable sales nearby. Similar size, bed and bath count, condition and location, sold recently enough to reflect today's market rather than last year's. This anchors the value.
What active buyers in that area recently paid. Their actual purchase prices on properties like yours—the ceiling your offer has to sit under. This is the line that matters most.
The typical purchase price band for buyers working that submarket. A consistent band tells you where offers clear. A scattered one tells you the area is thin or the buyers are opportunistic. Either way, you know what you're walking into.
Your repair and labor costs, itemized. Roof, HVAC, foundation, plumbing, cosmetics. A lump-sum guess is the single most common way an ARV calculation goes wrong. Line items force you to think like someone who's actually doing the work.
The condition those buyers purchase in. A buyer who only takes rent-ready properties isn't an exit for a gut job at any price. Knowing this tells you which buyers are even viable for which deals.
A Real Example
Say comps put the ARV around $200,000 and the repairs come to $40,000. The 70 percent rule puts a buyer near $100,000—that's $140,000 minus repairs. Subtract a $10,000 fee and your offer to the seller is about $90,000. Now check it against reality: if active buyers in that ZIP have been closing similar properties at $95,000 to $105,000, your number works and you have room. If they've been closing at $80,000, your contract is going to sit, and you know that before you've written it rather than three weeks after.
Here's the second read: the comps support your number but no active buyer in that area has purchased anything in that price band recently. That's not a green light. That's a market where your exit is theoretical, and the comp is telling you about demand that isn't currently being exercised.
None of this requires guessing. Recent sales, what buyers are paying, and the condition they buy in are all knowable before you make an offer—from verified property records.
Finding the Active Buyers and What They're Paying
The question you need answered before any offer goes on the table is: what are the investors actually buying in this area, and at what price? If you know that, you know the ceiling. If you don't, you're shooting blind.
One place to start is free. Agreedment's public market pages show you the active investor count in any county and the typical purchase prices those investors have been paying. No signup, no list—just the aggregate that tells you whether an area is thick with buyers or thin, and what the purchase band looks like. That's the number everything else in this post works backward from.
If you're working a market regularly and need to see the actual investors and their buy boxes—not just the aggregates—the dashboard takes it one layer deeper. You can filter to investors who've been actively buying, see their purchase history, find which ones have phone numbers in the system, and check how their typical purchase price aligns with your comps and ARV math. You get access to investor scoring and relationship tier, which tells you not just what they paid but whether they're the kind of repeat buyer who'll take several deals from you rather than a one-off.
The move is simple: before you call the seller, find the active investors and check what they've been paying. It's the one step that turns a guess into a calculation.
The Payoff
Work smarter, not harder. Build the number from the buyer's side first, then work backward to the seller.
Three things change when you do. Your offers hold up—you're not renegotiating with the seller after the buyer prices your contract, because the buyer's number was in your math from the start. Your repair estimates get sharper—once you underwrite as if you're the one buying, labor and materials stop being a rounding error and become a line item you actually track. Your buyer relationships compound—send deals that survive the buyer's own underwriting and you become the wholesaler they open first.
