Every dead wholesale deal I've seen traces back to one of two things: the seller wouldn't move on price, or the comps were wrong. The first one is just the business. The second one is on you, and it's the more painful one, because it usually doesn't show up until you've already got the property under contract and your end buyer's acquisitions guy is on the phone telling you your ARV is fantasy.
ARV is the single most important number in a wholesale deal. Get it right and everything downstream works: your max offer, your assignment fee, your buyer's margin. Get it wrong by 10% and you either tied up a property nobody will buy or you left thousands on the table because you scared yourself off a real deal. And the thing is, comping isn't hard. It's just easy to do lazily. Pulling the first five "sold" listings the software hands you and averaging the price per square foot is not comping. It's guessing with extra steps.
Here's how to actually do it.
What a comp really is
A comparable sale is a property so similar to yours that a buyer would have genuinely considered both. That's the whole test. Not "it's in the same city." Not "it has three bedrooms too." Would a buyer shopping for your subject property have also walked through this house and seen them as alternatives?
That bar is higher than most people set it. A 1,400 square foot ranch built in 1978 is not comparable to a 1,400 square foot new-construction townhome two miles away, even if the price per square foot looks similar. Same beds, same baths, same rough size, completely different buyer. When you mix those, your average lies to you.
So before you average anything, you're not collecting data points. You're collecting a small set of houses that a real buyer would have treated as substitutes for yours. Three excellent comps beat ten mediocre ones every single time.
The filters that actually matter
When you pull comps, you tighten in a specific order. Start loose, then cut until you've got a clean set.
- Distance. Stay tight. A quarter to half a mile in a dense neighborhood, maybe a full mile in suburban or rural areas. The moment you cross a school district line, a major road, or into a different subdivision, you've probably changed the market. Don't.
- Recency. Last 90 days is ideal, 6 months is the outer edge. Older than that and the market has moved, especially right now. A sale from 14 months ago is a history lesson, not a comp.
- Size. Within roughly 20% of your subject's square footage. A 2,000 square foot house is not a comp for a 1,200 square foot house no matter how close it sold.
- Type and style. Single-family to single-family. Same story count, similar age bracket, similar lot character. Don't comp a house with a half-acre against one on a postage stamp.
- Condition. This is the one everyone botches. More on it in a second.
If tightening those filters leaves you with two comps, that's a signal, not a failure. Thin comps mean your ARV is shaky and you should price conservatively, not that you should loosen the filters until you get the number you wanted.
Sold, not listed, and why active matters anyway
Your ARV comes from closed sales. Active listings are what sellers hope to get. Pending sales are somewhere in between. The actual closed price is the only number a real buyer will underwrite against, so that's your anchor.
But don't ignore the active and pending listings entirely. They tell you where the market is heading. If recent solds are landing at $300,000 but there are six active listings sitting at $340,000 with no offers, the market is softening and your conservative ARV just got more important. If solds were $300,000 and everything new is listing at $330,000 and going pending in a week, you've got tailwind. Solds set your number. Actives set your confidence.
Adjusting comps without lying to yourself
No comp is identical to your subject, so you adjust. This is where the skill lives. The principle is simple: if the comp is better than your subject, you adjust its price down to estimate what your subject would fetch, and if it's worse, you adjust up.
Say your subject is a 1,500 square foot three-bedroom with a one-car garage, and your best comp is the same thing but with a two-car garage and a renovated kitchen, sold at $310,000. That comp is better than your house. A second garage bay might be worth $8,000 in that market, the kitchen another $12,000. So your subject, fixed up to the same standard, is more like $290,000, not $310,000. Adjust down for what the comp has that yours doesn't.
The adjustments don't need to be precise to the dollar. They need to be honest about direction and rough magnitude. The mistake isn't imperfect adjustment numbers. The mistake is skipping adjustment entirely and pretending a superior comp tells you what your inferior subject is worth.
The condition trap
Here's the one that blows up wholesale deals. ARV means after repair value, the price once the house is fixed up to the standard of your comps. So your comps need to be houses that are already at that finished standard.
If you comp your tired, original-condition subject against three other tired, original-condition houses, you didn't find ARV. You found as-is value. Those are different numbers, often by $40,000 or more, and a fix-and-flip buyer is going to pay you based on the gap between them. Your repaired comps tell you what the house is worth done. Your as-is comps tell you roughly where it sits today. You need to know both, but you cannot use as-is comps to set ARV. That single confusion is responsible for more renegotiated and dead assignments than any other comping error I know.
When you pull your comps, look at the listing photos. Renovated kitchen, new floors, updated baths? That's an ARV comp. Original 1985 everything? That's a condition data point, useful for understanding your starting line, not your finish line.
On-market versus off-market context
One more layer. The houses you're buying off-market and the houses you're comping against usually sold on the open market, fully exposed, often after staging and a little fix-up. That's correct, because your end buyer is eventually selling on that same open market. The retail exit is what you're underwriting toward.
Just don't get fooled the other direction. If you find an off-market or distressed sale in your comp set, a foreclosure, an estate sale, an obvious investor-to-investor flip, treat it carefully. Those often closed below true market value for reasons that have nothing to do with the house. They can anchor your number too low. Recognize them and weight them lightly, the same way you'd discount a single weirdly high sale that was clearly a family transaction.
Building the number
Once you've got three to five clean, adjusted, finished-condition comps, you're not averaging blindly. You're looking for a tight cluster. If your adjusted comps land at $288,000, $292,000, $295,000, and $290,000, you've got a confident ARV right around $291,000. If they're scattered from $250,000 to $330,000, you don't have an ARV, you have a research problem, and you price to the conservative end while you figure out why the spread is so wide.
Then you build everything else on that anchor. Your max allowable offer, your assignment fee, your buyer's margin all flow from a number that has to survive a stranger's scrutiny. The whole point of comping carefully is that the number holds up when someone with money is trying to poke holes in it.
This is also where doing it by hand gets slow, and slow is how you end up cutting corners on the comp set. Inside PropQuest, the comps and recent sales pull up the moment you open a property, filtered by distance, recency, and size, so you start from a clean set instead of the first thing a search hands you. You still do the thinking, the adjusting, the condition read. The tool just gets you to a defensible starting point fast enough that you actually do the careful version every time instead of only when you have an hour.
Good comps aren't glamorous. But they're the difference between an assignment that closes and a property you tied up that nobody will touch.
