In this video Nathan Payne walks viewers through a complete financial analysis of a recent real‑estate transaction and explains why he chose to wholetail (buy, hold briefly, and resell as‑is) rather than flip or wholesale the property. He begins by emphasizing the need for a detailed calculator that incorporates hard‑money loan terms, interest, points, down‑payment, hold time, closing costs, and commissions. Using the calculator, he first models a traditional flip: purchase price $344k, ARV $500k, $90k estimated repairs, 12% interest, 2 points, 15% down, 6‑month hold, and standard 3% buyer and seller commissions. The projected profit ($8,766) looks unattractive, even after adjusting repair costs with a $1,000 agent fee and reducing buyer commission to 2.5%, which raises flip profit to about $25k. He then evaluates a straight wholesale scenario, zeroing repair and financing costs and targeting a sale price of $420k (later adjusted to $380‑390k by buyers), yielding a potential $42k profit. Finally, he proposes a wholetail approach: purchase with hard money (same terms), minimal cleanup ($500‑$700), list the property as‑is for $450k, pay a $1,000 flat listing fee, and a 2.5% buyer commission. The calculator predicts a $74k profit. In reality, a bidding war drove the sale price to $460k, the hold time was only two months, and the final profit was $86,600+. Nathan concludes that in a hot market with low inventory, wholetailing can outperform flipping or wholesale, and he urges investors to run multiple exit‑strategy scenarios with a calculator to choose the most profitable path.
Chapters
All right, everybody. What's going on? We're going to do a quick deep dive of this deal and why we chose to wholesale it instead of wholesale or fix and flip it. So the first thing you have to do if you want to be a serious real estate investor is have a calculator that calculates hard money, interest, closing costs, hold time, your commissions when you list it and you resell the property. So on this deal, the first thing we did is we were like, "Okay, what would it look like if we flipped it? How much money would we make if we flip this property? So I'll show you how to use this calculator. And again, you need one like this. So if you don't have one, you can look in the comments, the description below, and I'll have a free link to get this calculator I'm using that we use in our business. So first thing you want to do is determine the ARV of the property and what it's worth when it's in pristine condition, when it's fully flipped. So this house is worth $500,000. Fully flipped. That's what we believe it was worth from running our comps. We got it for $344,000. So we know if we flipped it, we'd have to get hard money, 12% interest, 2% points to borrow the money. We'd have to bring 15% down to get the hard money. The whole time would probably be about 6 months. And usually, it costs 3% for commissions to list it and 3% for buyer's commissions. But we actually have an in, and I'll show you that later. But that's usually what flippers have to pay. Now, we had some contractors come in and they bid us $80,000 to $100,000 to flip the house in order to get it to its ARV of $500,000. So I just go right in the middle, just for an example. And usually if they bid you $80,000 to $100,000, it's usually going to be more expensive than that. It's never really a lot less. So if you look at these numbers, you'd say, "Okay, look, that flip doesn't really make sense." You know, We're going to spend $90 to make $8,766. Not a good deal. Now, what we do is we have an agent that lists it for $1,000. So we zero this out. We just add $1,000 to the repair costs over here. And that's, you can see you can make a little bit more money. And also, instead of paying 3% of the buyer's commission, we do 2.5%. So you would actually, for us, we would've made $25,000 by flipping this property. But for me, I was like, "No, we can make way more on a deal this discounted in such a hot market." So we said, "We're not going to flip this thing." So next thing we said is, "What if we wholesale it? Just get it done, get it quick." So we said, "If we wholesale it," we first thought we could make $420,000 on the wholesale deal. And in order to check the wholesale numbers on this calculator, you have to zero out your repair costs and you have to zero out the cost of borrowing the money since you're just selling it straight up. So if we had, you know, been able to find a buyer that was willing, a fix and flipper that was willing to do, you know, take it at $420,000, we would have said, yeah, definitely. That's probably a good deal. But the buyers are coming out and the fix and flippers are like, yeah, you know what? I think we need this thing at $380,000, $390,000. So, you know, even at $390,000, we're talking, you know, what, $42,000, which is a good deal. But I said to my guys, and we decided, we can make more than that. So I said, "What if we wholesale it? What if we just buy it, close on it with hard money, and then just relist it as is?" So we ran comps and we said, homes selling in as-is condition in this area with similar condition are going for $450,000. So we said, "Okay. Well, we're going to maybe have to do a little bit work. We're going to have to clean it up." So we're going to I think we spent $500 on the cleanup and the cleaning lady, I think actually $700. And we would have to borrow hard money, 12%, 2 points to use the money, 15%, bring 50% down. We thought that the whole time we would take us 3 months to sell this thing. Remember our guy Nate, Nate Worthen, shout out Nate Worthen, our agent. He only charges $1,000 to list the property. So we didn't have to do that. And we did the buyer's commission for 2.5%. So we were like, "Hey, instead of making $22K on flipping this thing, instead of wholesaling it for $42K, let's shoot to make $74K." So what ended up happening is buyers came in, there's a bidding war. We actually ended up getting $460K for the property. And the hold time was actually only 2 months and everything else rang true. We got the interest and the hard money was that the whole time too, 15% down. And we had an agent that we only had to pay 2.5%. We had closing costs still, and we ended up making $86,600-something. And so it's pretty spot on. So as you can see, wholesaling right now is the play, in my opinion, in hot markets because inventory is low and people are okay with buying properties that aren't fixed up because they want to get into a house. So I'm so glad we did this. Strategy because the other strategies we would've made money, but not as much. So what you guys need to do is look at your options, your exit strategies on what's going to make you the most money and do that. And you're going to succeed and make more money in this industry. But that was the breakdown. The calculator is super helpful. And this is how we analyzed our deal.
