How Much Can You Actually Make on One Wholesale Deal
You found a house, or you're about to. The seller seems motivated, the numbers seem to work, and now you're trying to figure out if this is worth your time or a rounding error. That's the real question underneath "how much can I make wholesaling," and it deserves a real number, not a pep talk.
Here it is: most wholesale deals net between $5,000 and $15,000. Some go lower, especially your first few. Some go higher, into the $20,000 to $50,000 range, when the deal is distressed enough or the market is hot enough. A $250,000 assignment fee on a single house exists, but it's the exception people screenshot, not the average week. If you're doing the math on whether to spend the next three weeks chasing one lead, plan around $8,000 to $10,000 and be pleasantly surprised if it's more.
Now let's get into why the number lands where it does, because that's what actually helps you price your next offer.
How a Wholesale Fee Actually Gets Paid
You don't own the house. You control it with a purchase contract, then you assign that contract to a cash buyer for a fee before closing ever happens. The fee is the difference between what you contracted to pay the seller and what your buyer agrees to pay you for the contract.
Say you put a house under contract at $140,000. You find a buyer willing to pay $150,000 for that same contract. You assign it, the buyer closes with the seller at $150,000, and $10,000 of that goes to you at closing. You never touched title. You never used your own cash to buy the house. That $10,000 spread is your entire deal.
This is why the fee isn't a percentage of the house price the way a commission is. A $400,000 house and a $90,000 house can both produce a $10,000 fee, or both produce nothing, depending entirely on the spread you negotiated on the front end.
What Determines the Size of Your Fee
Three things set the ceiling on what you can charge.
First, the discount. Your buyer is a rehabber or a landlord, and they're only paying based on their own math: after repair value, minus their repair costs, minus their profit margin, minus your fee. If the house needs $40,000 in work and sells for $250,000 fixed up, your buyer is not going to pay full price minus $40,000. They need room to make money too, usually 15% to 20% of the after repair value as their profit.
Second, how much room you actually have between your contract price and that buyer's ceiling. This is where sellers who are truly motivated, meaning they need to sell fast more than they need top dollar, create the spread that becomes your fee.
Third, competition for the buyer's attention. If you have three cash buyers who all want this specific house, you can hold out for a bigger fee. If you have one buyer and he knows it's your only option, your fee shrinks fast.
A Real Deal, Worked Out
Take a 3-bedroom house that needs a full cosmetic rehab. After repair value in that neighborhood, based on three recent comparable sales, is $220,000.
Your buyer estimates repairs at $35,000. He wants a minimum profit of $40,000 on the deal, which is reasonable for a rehabber taking on that much work and risk. Add in his own closing costs and holding costs, call it $8,000.
$220,000 minus $35,000 minus $40,000 minus $8,000 leaves $137,000. That's the most your buyer can pay for the contract and still hit his numbers.
Now work backward from the seller's side. The seller is behind on payments and wants out in two weeks. You negotiate a contract price of $128,000. The gap between $137,000 and $128,000 is $9,000. That's your fee, and it's a realistic one, not a hyped one.
If you'd negotiated the seller down to $122,000 instead, your fee jumps to $15,000. If you'd only gotten them to $133,000, you're down to $4,000, which barely covers your marketing spend on that lead. The seller conversation is where your fee actually gets decided. Everything after that is paperwork.
What New Wholesalers Get Wrong
The biggest mistake is anchoring to other people's best deals instead of their own numbers. Someone posts a $35,000 assignment fee online and a new wholesaler assumes that's the standard, then feels like a failure when their first deal nets $6,000. A $6,000 deal that actually closes beats a $35,000 deal you're still chasing six months from now.
The second mistake is not running the buyer's numbers before making an offer to the seller. If you don't know your buyer's after repair value, repair estimate, and required margin ahead of time, you're guessing at your contract price, and guessing usually means offering too much and squeezing your own fee to nothing.
The third mistake is treating the fee as fixed instead of negotiable on both ends. You can renegotiate with the seller if repair costs come in higher than expected during your inspection. You can also shop the contract to more than one buyer instead of taking the first offer. Both of those conversations move your number, and both get skipped by people in a hurry to close something, anything.
The One Thing That Can Kill Your Fee
Here's the honest limitation. Your fee is only real once the deal closes, and deals fall apart. A buyer's financing falls through. An inspection turns up foundation work nobody priced in. The seller gets a better offer from a family member and backs out, contract or no contract. I've had deals I thought were locked at $12,000 that produced nothing because the buyer walked three days before closing.
There's no fee calculation that protects you from a deal that doesn't close. The way experienced wholesalers manage that risk is volume and a real buyer's list, not a bigger spread on any single house. One deal is never the plan. A pipeline is the plan.
That pipeline is the actual bottleneck for most people trying to do this. Not the math, the deal flow, finding sellers before someone else does and having buyers lined up before you need them. That's what Deal Machine is built for. If you're serious about turning this from a one-house question into a repeatable business, it's worth a look at readmoneydecoded.com/deal-machine.