How Many Offers Does It Take to Get a Wholesale Deal on MLS Listings?

There is no fixed number of offers it takes to get a wholesale deal on MLS listings. It depends mostly on how far under list you offer and how long the listings have been sitting. Offers near list price get accepted more often but leave no room for your fee. Offers at 60 to 70 percent of list leave room but get accepted less often. The way to find your number is to send a steady count of offers for a month, track five numbers (sent, opened, answered, under contract, assigned), and divide. Then set your weekly count from the deals you want.

This guide is for wholesalers and cash investors sending offers on listed properties.

Why nobody can give you the real number

Ask in any wholesaling group and you'll get answers all over the place. They can all be true for the person saying them, because they're measuring different things:

• How deep they offer. Someone offering 85% of list on fresh listings gets more yeses than someone offering 65% on everything.
• Which listings they pick. A house with 200 days on market and three price cuts is a different conversation than one listed last week.
• What they send. A signed state contract with proof of funds gets presented. A text with a number usually doesn't.
• Whether they follow up. Many listed deals come from the second or third touch, after a price cut.
• What they call a deal. Some count accepted offers, some count closings. Contracts fall apart, so those two numbers aren't the same.

So a number from someone else's market and someone else's offers won't tell you much. Your own will, and it only takes a month to get it.

The five numbers to track

Every offer you send moves through the same steps. Count each one:

1. Sent. Every offer that went to a listing agent. One offer per listing; a resend after a price cut counts as a new offer.
2. Opened. The agent opened it at least once. If you don't track opens, you can't tell an ignored offer from an unread one.
3. Answered. Any reply: a no, a question, or a counter.
4. Under contract. The seller signed your offer or a counter you accepted.
5. Assigned. A cash buyer took the contract (or you double closed) and you got paid.

Where offers stop tells you what to fix:

The guide to open tracking on offers explains what one open, several opens and a late open usually mean.

Work out your offers per deal

After a month, divide:

• Offers per contract = offers sent ÷ contracts signed
• Offers per deal = offers sent ÷ deals assigned or closed

Here's an example with round numbers to show the math. Say you sent 100 offers in a month. 70 were opened, 12 agents answered, 4 sellers countered, and 2 offers went under contract. One of those you assigned. That's 50 offers per contract and 100 offers per deal.

Those numbers aren't a benchmark. They're the shape of the math. Your first month might be 30 per contract or 150. What matters is that it's yours, measured on the listings and the prices you actually send.

Keep counting after the month ends. Offers keep turning into contracts weeks later, when a seller who said "not yet" cuts the price again and remembers the signed offer already in the agent's inbox.

Set your weekly offer count from your goal

Once you know your offers per deal, the weekly count is simple math:

• Offers per month = deals you want per month × your offers per deal
• Offers per week = offers per month ÷ 4

With the example above (100 offers per deal) and a goal of two deals a month, that's 200 offers a month, or 50 a week, which is 10 every weekday. If your average assignment fee is $10,000, those two deals are $20,000 a month in fees.

Two ways to hit a bigger goal: send more offers, or lower your offers per deal. Most wholesalers try only the first. The second is usually cheaper.

What lowers your offers per deal

Each of these moves offers further down the funnel:

• Pick motivated listings. Sort by cumulative days on market and price cuts, not plain days on market. The MLS days on market guide covers CDOM and ADOM, and the 180+ days on market strategy covers the oldest listings.
• Price from the math. Start from 70% of ARV minus repairs, then take your fee off that. The free MAO calculator does it from an address. A flat percent of list wastes offers on houses where the numbers never worked.
• Send what agents present. The signed state contract, proof of funds and a short cover email. The MLS wholesaling paperwork guide lists what goes in the package, and why listing agents ignore offers covers what gets skipped.
• Call on the open. The best time to call is right after the agent opens your offer, while it's on their screen.
• Resend on price cuts. A price cut is the seller telling you they're closer to your number. Send a fresh offer that week.

How to send that many offers without a VA

At 10 offers a weekday, the bottleneck is the paperwork. Done by hand, each offer means looking up the owner, parcel and legal description in county records, filling the contract and writing the email, which takes 15 to 20 minutes. That's three hours a day before a single phone call.

I built SendMLS to take that part off your plate. Type an address and it fills your state contract from county records and the active listing, attaches your proof of funds and sends it from your own Gmail in about a minute. Every offer is logged with when the agent opened it, so the first two numbers in your funnel keep themselves, and each offer stays in a pipeline from sent to countered, accepted or rejected.

If you're just starting out, the guide to wholesaling MLS properties walks through the whole process from picking listings to assigning the contract.

FAQ

How many offers does it take to get a wholesale deal?

It depends on how far under list you offer and how motivated the listings are, so there's no one number. Send a steady count for a month, then divide offers sent by contracts signed. That ratio, measured on your own listings and prices, is the number to plan around.

How many offers should a wholesaler send per week?

Work backward from your goal: deals you want per month times your offers per deal, divided by four. Many wholesalers working listed properties start at about 100 offers a month, five each weekday, then adjust once they know their own ratio.

What percent of list price should I offer on MLS listings?

Start from the deal math, not the list price: 70% of ARV minus repairs is what a cash buyer pays, and your offer is that minus your fee. On aged listings that often lands between 60 and 75 percent of list. A flat percent of list is fine as a first filter, not as your offer.

Why am I sending offers and getting no deals?

Look at where your offers stop. Not opened usually means the email isn't landing. Opened with no answer usually means the agent had nothing to present, like a text or a letter of intent instead of a signed contract. Counters that die mean slow replies. Contracts you can't assign mean the price was too high for your buyers.

How long does it take to get your first wholesale deal on the MLS?

It depends on your volume and your follow-up more than anything. Wholesalers who send offers every weekday and follow up on every open and every price cut get there faster than those who send a batch and wait. Some contracts come from offers sent weeks earlier.

Send your next ten offers by lunch

The number of offers it takes isn't luck. It's a ratio you can measure and improve. Start a free 7-day trial of SendMLS: type an address, it fills your state approved contract, and the offer goes out from your own Gmail with proof of funds attached and open tracking, so your offer count and opens track themselves. Or see how it works first.