Two Ways to Get Paid on the Same Deal
You've got a house under contract. You're not planning to close on it yourself — you're planning to hand it to someone else and get paid for finding it. There are two standard ways to do that: assign the contract, or double close. Most new wholesalers pick whichever one they heard about first and stick with it. That's backwards. The right structure depends on the deal in front of you, not on habit.
What Assignment Actually Is
An assignment is simple: you sell your position in the contract, not the property itself. Your end buyer pays you an assignment fee, steps into your shoes, and closes directly with the seller. You're never on title. It's fast, it's cheap to execute, and in a lot of states it doesn't require any outside funding at all — you're not buying anything, so you don't need money to close.
What a Double Close Actually Is
A double close is two separate closings, back to back, usually the same day. You actually buy the property from the seller (the A-B side), then immediately sell it to your end buyer (the B-C side). You're on title, even if only for a few hours. Because you're the one buying, you typically need funding to cover the A-B purchase — which is where transactional funding comes in.
The Real Deciding Factor Isn't Preference — It's the Numbers
A rough rule of thumb worth knowing: once your gross spread — the gap between what you're paying and what your buyer's paying — clears somewhere around $10,000, a double close usually starts making more sense. Below that line, funding and closing costs on two transactions can eat the whole advantage, and a straight assignment fee often nets you more with a lot less moving around.
But a rule of thumb is a starting point, not a decision. Run the actual numbers on both structures before you commit — assignment fee versus double-close spread minus real funding and closing costs. We built a free calculator for exactly this if you want to run your own deal through it: try the Deal Calculator.
When Assignment Makes More Sense, Even on a Big Spread
- Your buyer is proof-of-funds verified and ready to close fast, and there's no reason to add a second closing.
- The seller or the deal doesn't tolerate a delay — a double close means two closings have to land, not one.
When Double Close Makes More Sense
- Your state treats repeated contract assignment — or marketing a property you don't actually own — as activity that requires a real estate license. This is a real legal line, not a technicality; some states define brokering broadly enough that doing this again and again without a license is a genuine risk. Double close sidesteps the issue entirely, since you actually take title instead of marketing someone else's contract.
- The seller's contract or listing agreement specifically prohibits assignment.
- Your buyer's lender or title company won't accept an assigned contract.
- You want your margin kept private from either the seller or the buyer, which an assignment fee doesn't allow — the seller can often see what your buyer paid.
- The spread genuinely justifies the extra moving parts.
The Actual Move
Don't pick a structure and then go looking for numbers to justify it. Get the seller's price and your buyer's price locked in, run both structures through real math, and let the stronger number and the legal facts of your state decide. If you want to see how this plays out in real, messy deal files — not simplified textbook examples — the Deal Lab has scenarios built around exactly this decision.