I read @retipsterseth great article on wholesaling as well as numerous other articles and videos. However, I have a few questions if someone with some wholesaling experience wouldn't mind chiming in.
1) In general, what do you charge for an assignment fee? For example, let's say that a property owner has a property they are willing to sell for $20,000 but I think that it can be sold for $30,000. Do you just charge a certain percentage of what the owner is agreeing to sell for (i.e. 6% for an assignment fee of $1,200) or do you make your assignment fee to cover the difference (i.e. $10,000)?
2) Who pays for closing costs, the buyer or the seller? In the event that the seller pays closing costs, how does this work as the closing costs would then be deducted from the amount they were guaranteed initially ($20,000)? Do you then have to restructure your original agreement?
1. From my conversations with several wholesalers over the years, I think a common assignment fee amount is $5,000 (i.e. - that would be a starting point for many assignment fees on houses), but you can really go as high as you want, so long as it doesn't cause issues with your end-buyer getting miffed at how much money you're making. If you do have concerns about that, you could do a double closing instead, so your original seller doesn't know how much you're re-selling it for, and your end-buyer doesn't know how much you paid for it in the first place.
Double closings have their own set of challenges too, but if you can find a good, investor-friendly title company that can make it easy for you (and preferably, use single-source funding, so you don't need to pay for any transactional funding). We interviewed @BradenC about this a few months back, and he explains a lot of how this works in his house wholesaling business (he does mostly assignments). You can hear the interview in episode 85.
2. I think you can structure this however you want, depending on the needs of each party. Personally, I would default to having the end buyer pay for these costs. Since they should already be getting a killer deal on the property in the first place, they shouldn't have any big qualms about covering the closing costs.