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The Mechanic of the Assignment versus the Double Close 8:46 Lena: Okay, so let's get into the nitty-gritty of the "Fork in the Road." You’ve got a deal under contract, you’ve found a buyer—now how do you actually get paid? I know "Assignment" is the go-to, but when does it become a bad idea?
9:00 Miles: Assignment is the "fast and cheap" route. You’re literally just signing a one-page document that says, "I’m handing my rights to this contract over to Buyer C for a ten-thousand-dollar fee." You only have one closing, which keeps your costs low—maybe five hundred bucks in admin fees. But the big trade-off is transparency. The seller and the buyer both see your fee on the settlement statement. If you’re making a five-thousand-dollar spread on a hundred-thousand-dollar house, no one usually blinks. But what if you’re making forty thousand?
9:30 Lena: I can imagine the seller sitting at the table, seeing that you’re making forty grand just for connecting the dots, and suddenly feeling like they got ripped off. Even if the price was fair to them, human nature kicks in, right?
9:41 Miles: It does. I’ve seen deals die at the closing table because a seller got angry about the "wholesaling fee." That’s where the Double Closing—or the "Simultaneous Close"—comes in. In a double close, you have two distinct transactions. Closing A is the Seller to You. Closing B is You to the End Buyer. For a few minutes, or maybe a few hours, you actually own the house.
10:04 Lena: So, because they’re separate transactions, the original seller never sees what the end buyer paid?
0:47 Miles: Exactly. Your profit is private. It’s just the difference between your purchase price and your sale price. This is also a huge "legal workaround" in those stricter states we talked about. Because you actually take title, you’re not "brokering" a deal—you’re just a person buying a house and then selling a house they own. It removes almost all the legal ambiguity around unlicensed activity.
10:33 Lena: But I’m assuming there’s a catch. If I’m actually "buying" the house in Closing A, I need the money to pay for it, right? I can’t just use the end buyer’s money to fund my first purchase.
10:44 Miles: In most states, like Florida, using the "C" buyer’s funds to close the "A-B" transaction is actually illegal or against title company policy. You need what’s called "Transactional Funding" or "Flash Cash." There are lenders who specialize in this—they’ll lend you the full purchase price for twenty-four hours for a fee, usually around one to three percent of the loan.
11:05 Lena: So if I’m doing a double close on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar deal, I might pay three or four thousand dollars in funding fees, plus two sets of closing costs, title insurance, and transfer taxes. That really eats into the profit.
9:41 Miles: It does. A double close can easily cost you three to five thousand dollars more than an assignment. So, you have to do the math. If your spread is only seven thousand dollars, a double close is a bad move—you’d lose half your profit. But if you’re looking at a thirty-thousand-dollar spread, paying five grand to protect the deal and your privacy is just the cost of doing business.
11:40 Lena: It’s like a sliding scale. Most wholesalers seem to use assignments for about eighty percent of their deals and save the double close for the "big fish" or the properties where assignments are prohibited, like bank-owned REOs or properties on the MLS.
11:54 Miles: That’s a perfect way to look at it. And it’s not just about the money; it’s about the "Chain of Title." Some buyers, especially institutional ones or people using conventional financing, require a clean title transfer. They don't want to see an assignment fee. They want to see that they bought it from *you*. The double close gives them that professional, "clean" transaction they’re looking for.
12:15 Lena: So, the takeaway for the listener is: default to assignment for simplicity, but always have a transactional lender on speed dial for when you hit that home run deal and need to keep it quiet.