BiggerPockets

Ive never rehabbed, so when I'm wholesaling what is the best way to estimate repair costs of the property?

Pay a good GC to babystep you through repair estimates.

Don't you find GCs tend to be too detail oriented? I look for ballpark figures, eg paint interior = $2000, new furnace = $3000, etc. I don't want to have to measure rooms or balance heat flow calculations, etc.

Note to OP: don't use these numbers, as they vary city to city, and with size of house.

Roy -

I don't mean to be a e-peen measuring toolbag here, but that attitude is why most real investors pay absolutely zero attention to what the wholesaler claims the repair cost is... wholesalers tend to find real (aka: Useful, realistic) quotes to be 'too detailed' and 'tedious', and as a result tend to miss tens of thousands of dollars worth of repairs.

And just in general - I hate it when wholesalers give me sauce about balancing heat flow. If you can't handle sqft/600 = roughly the tonnage for the HVAC, you need to find another business to be in.

And another thing - measuring rooms isn't that hard. Get a laser measuring tool and zap together some quick figures for sqyds of carpet, hardwoods, tile. No one is asking you to for a to-the-inch measurement, but it gets under my skin when a wholesaler tells me that "It's only 900 sqft of hardwoods/carpet!" and it ends up being more like 1800 sqft of hardwoods/carpet. It makes me believe that their eyes and calculators are malfunctioning.

TL;DR - wholesalers who can't be bothered to even PRETEND to make real cost estimates are lazy and give wholesalers a bad name.

To be a credible wholesaler you must present realistic repair values, there is no other way around out. The bulk of your business will be through repeat buyers and referrals, and you will get very few if you do not put in the time and effort to provide numbers to your potential buyers. If I was working with a wholesaler and he/she provided me with bogus, incomplete, or general numbers, I would dismiss them as inexperienced, uneducated or just a bad business person and never work with them again.

As an investor I pour hours of my time and energy into finding profitable deals and seeing them through to the end and I expect a wholesale to pour his/her energy into bringing me good deals. I try to be the best at my job, and I would expect a good wholesale to do the same.

Jerry Norton has the most informative video I've scene on the [REMOVED] for estimating repairs that you can take notes from.

To get info about things you don't know about try going to netwroking. Search who is doing what you want to be doing that's giving out free info threw articles, blogs, and check how well they conduct themselves online. Alot of those guys don't post in forums.

I never knew about this one has it worked well for you kevin?