SELLING YOUR HOME

Before You Reply to That Wholesaler Text

By Farrah Gauthreaux•7 min read•May 14, 2026

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I get asked about this almost every month. Someone gets a text — "Hi this is Brett, I'm a local cash buyer, I'd love to make you an offer on your house at 1247 Elm, no repairs needed, can close in two weeks" — and they want to know what to make of it. The honest answer is that for most sellers, the wholesaling route ends up costing more than it looks like on the surface. Here's how it actually works.

Brett isn't buying your house

That's worth understanding up front. When you sign a wholesaler's contract, they're not committing to buy your house. They're getting the right to buy at the price they offered, and then they have a window — usually thirty days — to find another buyer who'll pay them more. They keep the difference. If they can't find that buyer, the contracts typically include enough exit clauses that they can walk away. In that case you don't sell — you just spent a month off the market with the house tied up.

The legal term for this is "assignment." The wholesaler assigns the contract to the actual buyer. You probably won't even know that's happened until closing day, when the name on the deed isn't the name on the offer you signed.

The number they offer is the floor of their math, not the value of your house

The wholesaler is solving a different equation than a real buyer. They're solving: what's the highest number I can offer this person where I can still flip the contract for a profit to a flipper or a landlord? That number is somewhere between 60 and 75 cents on the dollar of what a regular buyer on the open market would pay. Sometimes worse.

I had a seller last year who almost signed at $215,000. They were ready to be done — house had been their mother's, full of stuff, they didn't want to deal with it. I asked for a week to list it. We cleaned it out enough to photograph (didn't even paint), listed at $289,000, and closed at $283,000 nineteen days later. The difference between the wholesale offer and the open-market sale was about $68,000.

The pitch leans hard on speed and avoiding the agent fee

And both of those are real, in a sense. A wholesale close is fast when it actually closes (which is not always). And you do save the commission. But the discount tends to be much larger than the commission savings, especially right now.

On that $283k house, the commission was roughly $14,000. The wholesale offer would have cost the seller closer to $68,000 in proceeds. That's the trade-off to look at clearly before signing.

How the targeting works

The texts go out by the thousands. They're scraped from public records: anyone who inherited a house, anyone behind on taxes, anyone whose property records suggest a stressed situation. Estates, divorces, deferred maintenance, elderly homeowners, out-of-state owners. The script is designed to feel personal, but it isn't — they're using a bulk SMS tool and a list they bought from a data broker. If you got the text, it's because your name showed up on a list, not because of anything specific about your situation.

If you do need to sell fast, there are better options

I'll mention these even though some of them mean less business for me, because they usually serve sellers better than the wholesale route.

Actual buy-and-hold investors and rental companies will typically pay closer to 80-85% of market value — still a discount, but a real one with a real close.
A staged listing with a 7-day showing window will usually get you within range of fair market in three to four weeks.
An auction format works for certain properties and certain situations, especially probate.
Even an as-is listing with realistic pricing tends to outperform a wholesale contract in most cases I've seen.