The Wisconsin Investor

How One Simple Offer Formula Unlocks More Real Estate Wins

• Corey Reyment

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The Simple Offer Mistake Costing WI Investors $25K–$30K Per Deal


Many Wisconsin investors say, “There are no deals out there.” But in this episode, Corey breaks down why that belief isn’t true—and how one small tweak in your offer formula can instantly make you more competitive.

This lesson came from a real coaching conversation with a team member, and the numbers were eye-opening. By using the wrong calculation method, many investors are losing deals and leaving tens of thousands of dollars on the table. With one adjustment, you could win 2–3 more deals this year—worth $60K or more for many flippers.

In this episode, we cover:
• Why the common “75% of ARV minus rehab” formula is holding you back
• Corey’s preferred method for running flip numbers—and why it works better
• A side-by-side example showing the $25K–$30K profit difference
• How private money can expand your options and make your offers stronger
• Why emotion-free calculators help you compete in today’s market
• The mindset shift required to stop saying “no deals exist” and start winning them

If you want 2026 to be your strongest deal-finding year yet, this episode will help you rethink your approach and become more competitive across the board.

New Year Giveaway:
We’re giving away a $250 gift card, a 1-hour strategy call with Corey, and a Wisconsin Investor Starter Kit. Details on our Facebook and Instagram pages.

Want help making your offers stronger?
 Reach out at corey@ibuywi.com

Speaker:

What's up, everybody? Corey Reyment here with another episode of the Wisconsin Investor. And today it's me. You're stuck with me. I'm surprised. I'm your I'm your special guest today. But I'm really excited about today's episode, guys. Um, where this is going to come from, guys, is if you are struggling with getting deals, okay. Today, my hope is that we are going to be able to give you some ideas to help open you up, maybe to creating more success this year for you than you've ever seen before. And it could be with this one simple tweak, we'll call it, in your process. So there might be a mistake you're making right now. That's a very easy switch to make. And we're going to talk about um how to do that to get you more competitive on more deals this year to make this your next best 12 months you've ever had. All right. So I'm really excited about this. So, where did this come from, guys? I was working with somebody on our team, and uh I do a little sit-down with everybody on our team once or twice a year. We try to do these one-on-one coaching sessions, like what we're doing for this giveaway contest. All right. And um, through that, we really uncovered, you know, some opportunities maybe to change some things that uh they were doing um potentially to become more competitive on some deals. Okay. And I think this is a common thing. This isn't just with our team, you know, when I'm whenever I'm working with people or coaching people, I see a lot of times there's just little tweaks that we can make all right that are gonna make a big, big difference and making you more competitive on the deals. Because let's face it, guys, the market's the market's tough and it has been tough, right? Like one of the most common things I hear from investors who are not actively doing deals consistently is I'll say, I can't find any deals. Okay. How many of you guys out there listening to this right now or watching on YouTube? You say, Yep, that's me. I just can't find any deals. There's no deals. All right. What I want you to do right now is just take a little self-inventory, okay? And ask yourself, how long have you been telling yourself that narrative? All right, because it's not true. The reality is it's not true. But if you're catching yourself saying, ah, Corey, this guy, you're gonna turn me off right now because I'm telling you something that's counterintuitive to your beliefs. Uh, I'm just asking you to give yourself an honest assessment of is that statement that you have made to yourself and to others actually a true statement? And here's why I want to challenge you with a couple things, right? In our company this year, we've locked up over 200 deals this year, okay? Of those deals, I think we have done several of those have been flips. And typically when we flip them, what happens is none of you guys buy it. And we look at it and we say, well, we still think it's a good deal, so we're just gonna flip it ourselves, right? That's typically how we end up with a flip. Um, I will say this year we have taken some lumps on some of these. So some of these you guys passed on, kudos to you because we have taken some bumps on some things. We've learned some good lessons through this process. That'll be a whole nother episode that'll probably talk about some of the things that we have learned in 2025 from doing some of our own flips that you guys passed on. Um but point being is think about that. Of all of the deals that we've locked up, let's say I think about 180 of those will end up going to investors, okay? And now a lot of those people are they're not buying, you know, 50 of these. We don't have like one investor out there that's buying 50 of these things and eating up all of it. It's a lot of you know, somebody buying three, four, five a year from us that adds up to being that bigger amount. All right. So if you've sat here in the last 12 months and you have not picked up any deals, and the thing you're telling yourself is that there are no deals available. There's no good deals. I can't make anything work. I'm gonna challenge you today. All right. This is gonna be a challenging episode for you. But hopefully, if you're willing to embrace that challenge, if you're willing to run into the storm here with me today, uh, and we're just gonna make, again, we're gonna talk about some really hopefully simple tweaks that you can make if some of these things are your Achilles heel here. Hopefully, this year you're gonna be much more competitive, whether you're buying from our company at Wisconsin Discount Properties, or you're buying on the MLS, or you're buying from other wholesalers, it's a competition, okay? And you've gotta, you've gotta be dialed in in this, in this market to be able to be competitive and to hit your goals, right? So think about this. If we can make one tweak today to your process that opens your mind up a little bit, makes that switch, it's gonna allow you to get, say, two more deals next year. And let's say you're flipping and you want to make $30,000 a flip, that's $60,000 a year you could potentially make from just listening to this show today and taking action on this stuff and challenging yourself. Okay, so don't tune this out. Tune in, lean in, and let's uncover some things. And I'll share my screen. So those of you guys listening on uh some of the audio versions of this, I'll do my best to describe some of the stuff I'm gonna share. You guys on YouTube, well, you don't have to worry about it. You're gonna see it all here, okay? Um, but again, where some of this stuff comes from, guys, where what I'm gonna get into first is running our numbers, okay, and how we are calculating our offer price. Okay. So recently at one of the REI success meetings, Reese Brown from our team did an amazing presentation. And I don't have his calculator today because I just wanted to show you guys some quick math on some things to just make the point on today's episode. But he has an amazing calculator and he is doing one-on-one coaching sessions as well for people out there that are listening to this that want help making these next 12 months and beyond their best yet. And in that process, he he will give you that calculator. And I'm telling you what, it takes all of the emotion out of offering. Okay. But that's what we're gonna talk about today. Okay, so where this came from, kind of backing up. I was having a coaching session with one of our teammates, and they were describing um how they make their offers, okay, and how they come up with their offer price. And it makes total sense why they need to do this way. So they offer the traditional 75% minus rehab. All right, that's how they come up with their offer price. All right. And I've always thought the percent of ARV for flips, the way of doing it, is flawed. I can uh I will stand on that all day long that if you are running your numbers for as in your flipper and you're basing your offer price on a percentage of the ARV minus rehab, you're doing it all wrong. And I will I will argue that to the death. I'll be like one of those guys that has the tablecloth sitting out there and it says, you know, make me think otherwise or whatever that meme is. All right, I'll stand on that because I think it's completely wrong. And I'm gonna show you guys that today. Now, why this individual was doing that makes total sense, okay? Their thought process was if I can't sell this thing and I have to turn it into a rental, I need to be able to refinance this thing for a DSCR loan, and I need to be able to do it at 75% of the ARV. So if you factor that out, you take that 75% of ARV, you subtract your rehab, you're all into it. Let's say your rehab budget comes in line, your appraisals all work out, you're at 75% of that, you can't flip it, you can't sell it. Well, now you can refinance that thing and you don't have to worry about coming out of pocket a bunch of money to try to refinance it. Makes total sense why somebody would do that. I'm just challenging you. If you are a flipper, you're looking to do a lot of flips, and that is not your current situation, okay. I'm gonna show you mathematically how you're missing out on a lot of money today. Okay. Now, one of the things that we talked about for this individual was raising private money. Okay, so I'm gonna briefly touch on that because again, if the lending situation for you is the reason that you have to offer that way, then the problem isn't necessarily like what I'm gonna show you today, it might be enlightening for you, but it's not gonna change your situation. All right. So for this person, I you know, we went through the math and it makes total sense why that math for being competitive on offers is flawed, but it doesn't change their situation, right? Um, because of that, they have to offer that way because they don't have other you know bankable options or banking options at this stage in their life. Okay. So one of the things that we discovered in that call was or in that um session was raising private money. So now one thing that we also uncovered is this person does have sources of private money, and those private money lending sources are willing to be in second position. So if this person needs money for rehab or down payments or any of that kind of thing, they're willing, um, they have private lenders that are willing to use that. Okay. Couple things that could be an issue for those of you out there that are in that similar situation and you're planning to use hard money lending, okay? Or in fact, a lot of lending. A lot of community banks, um hard money lenders, they do not like having second mortgages on properties. So this is something up front if you're planning to use a hard money lender or a commercial lender, have that conversation with those lenders up front to understand are they gonna be okay if you have to bring somebody else in? Okay, there's a little workaround sometimes with this, and again, it depends on the lender. Um, and you want to get out in front of this before you're like, man, I got the I got a smoking deal here. That's gonna be amazing. Start having these conversations today if that's your situation. You may have to start an LLC potentially with that other individual, and they may have to have like their credit done and their bet, you know, their workup done and all that sort of stuff. Um, if they're gonna be the money contributing partner to that deal. Okay. Now you can still work it out as if it was a note and a mortgage, and you can still do, you know, you can make that agreement however you want. So you can say, hey, you're still gonna get just 10% of the money that you put in back as a return at the end of this thing versus um like a 50-50 partnership. Just because you do an LLC with somebody does not mean that you have to do a 50-50 partnership with that person. Okay. It just means it's a just a different instrument you can use to do a little workaround of this second mortgage problem that some lenders are gonna have. Okay. So have that conversation with your lenders, be up front with them, tell them what you're trying to do, what your struggle is, how you think you can work around it. And a lot of times they're gonna be super helpful with helping uncover that. Okay. So that was their situation. Now, the private money piece of that, what we talked about is hey, what if you had lenders that would just lend you the entire amount you need? And you don't have to worry about pairing up a second mortgage. You don't have to worry about are you gonna be able to refinance this thing if you're a hard money lender? You know, you usually get six months to turn these properties around with a hard money lender, or they're gonna come smoke you in interest and fees and everything else and just start to sync you, or take that property from you. Okay. So private money was great about that. And what I mean by private money, for those of you guys that aren't sure, is it just relationships. This is your own network. So this is your friends, your family, whoever else it is. And this is why we always promote you guys to share this show on your social media accounts. Subscribe to it, follow it, let people know you're doing it because it helps them know that you're into real estate. A lot of people that listen to the show, they have side jobs or full-time, you know, full-time W-2 jobs. This is a side thing for them. This is a way of you sharing this show is a way for you to let your network know that, hey, I'm into real estate. I'm actively learning real estate. I'm doing things to better myself, to be a uh a more educated investor, making you more credible to somebody who's willing to give you some money. Okay. So, what we what I like to do when I'm asking for private money is I do the third-party ask a lot of times. So, hey, I've got a deal, or I'm looking to get into real estate investing, or um, you know, you start with either one of those, depending on where you're at in the journey. I've been doing a lot of research into real estate investing. I've been going to these meetups, I've been listening to these podcasts, I've I've dialed in, I've done my education, I've done my homework. Um, now I'm just I'm putting offers in and I'm looking forward to getting my first deal here. You know, do you happen to know anybody that would um want to come in on a deal with me and I'm I'm paying 10% return on that cash um while I'm using it? Do you have anybody in your network that you know that might be interested in coming in on a deal like that? Most of the time, if that person has money and they trust you, they're gonna raise their hand and say, hey, hey, I got some cash. What do you know? What do you need? Now you might only raise, you know, 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 in that conversation. And that might be good money for down payment, second mortgage, rehab, cash, whatever the case case might be. And maybe it's not that person that you need that's gonna lend the whole amount. Okay. The other thing that may happen is they may test you on a deal. All right. So maybe they've got a lot more money than you think, but they might test you on a deal first and say, well, hey, look, I got 25 grand. I can I can borrow to you. Um, and um, you know, if that goes well, maybe there'll be some more. And you may open up a whole nother big thing. You might have to prove yourself on that first deal with them. And sometimes you may want to just take their money in on a deal, even though you don't need it, just to kind of get get them familiar with the process and get them liking lending to you. Okay. So that's a little bit on the private money thing. But if you can go out there and you can raise enough private money from an individual or a couple individuals that they will fund the entire project for you. And a lot of times people don't really want their money back if they're gonna lend it to you. They want to just keep earning that money. You know, I usually offer eight to ten percent as a depending on the deal and how long we're gonna have it. 10% if it's a shorter term deal, 8% maybe if it's a longer term deal. Um, sometimes if it's really short, like I turn their money really quick. Sometimes I'll even throw extra money at them and just say, hey, here's an extra 500 bucks for you know, because it was so short, I want to make sure it's worth your while, right? Kind of give them like a minimum amount of interest. I don't ever promise that usually on the front end. So something I might just throw at them at the end as a little extra thank you for lending because it's a pretty minimal amount of interest when you really add it up uh in a short-term flip loan. All right. So that's a little bit about the private money. That can open you up, number one, right there, to being able to change your buy box, change your numbers. Okay. Now, let's get into the math on this. So I'm gonna show you guys a couple of screens here to just start showing you the math on this. And I've never done this on this platform. So hopefully this comes through on your guys' side. Otherwise, I just wasted a lot of time today. I don't want to do that. All right, we are pulling up the screen share. There it is. So, first thing we're gonna look at is some buy boxes, okay? So when I'm running numbers, as I'm typically just looking at uh, I'm typically just looking at this this side here, the 300,000. So what I have here, guys, I have an ARV of 300,000. I just picked random numbers here, okay. This is not like a real deal, there's nothing here, but it just shows you this is some quick math ways to evaluate a flip. So it's 300,000 on the ARV. All right, and then I take 10% off the top for quick math. And what that kind of factors in is like again, if this is a flip, it's gonna be some holding costs, and there's some closing costs, some realtor commissions when I sell it, um, utilities, kind of bunching all of that in. Again, it's not perfect. If you've got a bigger project, you may want to maybe change that to 85% or something like that, right? Now I said I don't believe in the percent off rule, but what ends up happening there, it is a percent off rule. It's just a different percent off rule than what most people do. The difference is I add in the profit of what I want to make on these. Okay. So uh in my formula, I've got 300,000, 90% of that ARV. So I take 10% off the top. That's just gonna give me all of those little clumps of costs thrown in there. Okay, and it's pretty close typically, even though right now interest rates are a little higher than what they have been, it's pretty close. If you're using hard money again, it might be different. You may want to add in a little bit more maybe in your rehab budget, quote unquote, um, or for factoring in some of those points and fees and extra expenses. Okay. But then we've got the rehab costs. So I have 40,000 in on both of these examples for rehab costs. And then I said, hey, if I'm gonna do this, I want to make 30,000 on this flip. Okay. Now, some of you guys maybe it's 20,000, some of you guys maybe it's 40,000. That's a number that you have to decide on. And if you're putting in a pretty high profit number you want to make on a lot of these, and you're being conservative on your ARDs, and you're being conservative on your rehab numbers, um, meaning you're you're inflating your rehab numbers to cover a lot of oopsie budgets, or you're not super dialed in with your numbers, you're gonna miss a lot of deals. Okay, so this formula that I'm showing you guys that I use, it still has its flaws if you're getting emotional about it. And that's why I'm really saying the calculator Reese put together is really, really solid because it takes a lot of this emotion out of it. But let's just say we're dialed in on our numbers, okay? I've got 90% of 300,000 is 270. I subtract 40,000 for my rehab estimate, and I want to make $30,000. Okay. My max allowable offer, M-A-L, is $200,000. Okay. Now we're going to take the same exact scenario and we're going to move it over to the formula that I see a lot of investors using. All right. And that's the 75% rehab or 75% of ARV minus rehab that gets them their max allowable offer. Okay. So in the same example, investor B, ARV is $300,000. 75% of the ARV is $225,000, and then their rehab budget of $40,000. Same thing. Okay. Their max allowable offer is $185,000. All right. So if you're in a competitive scenario here, you are missing out right here. If I'm making if I'm offering on that same deal, I just got I just got an offer over you and I'm going to make an estimated $30,000 on this, right? So you just literally cost yourself $30,000 because of the formula that you're using. All right. Again, I know I'm I'm generalizing, right? So when I ran this, I said, well, gosh, you know, in today's world with higher interest rates and all this other stuff, how accurate is my formula that I use? All right. I just wanted to double check it and make sure I was I wasn't not accounting for something. So I ran into a little more detailed calculator. Okay. So here's a calculator that I'll use to break the cost down much further. So down here I've got my purchase price. So I just threw in my calculator of $200,000. Okay, so that's down here. I don't know why I put it way at the bottom. Probably should have put it way up here, but whatever. All right. Then I've got my list price. This is my ARV, $300,000. Uh, you're gonna see real estate commissions 4%. That's what I pay on flips. I would recommend for those of you out there that are investors and you're planning to do more than one deal, you negotiate with your real estate agents. Four and a half percent. I've seen that pretty reasonable. Anything above that, I think you're paying too much. All right. Sorry, all my real estate agent friends out there. I know you hate that when I say it and I said it a million times, but I really do. I think you're paying way too much if you're paying over four and a half percent uh for real estate commissions. All right. Now, typically most of the realtors are gonna have some kind of admin fee or something else that they'll charge you. Um that's like a separate line item than the commissions. $295, pretty standard. You might see $395, whatever the case is in this day and age. It's a hundred dollar difference, it doesn't really matter. Okay. Interest paid. So just to check my formula here, yep, that's accurate. So estimated days held, I put 120 days in here. All right, so we got about a four month flip, is what I estimated on this $40,000 rehab. Now, $40,000 rehab could be longer than that if it's a lot of detail stuff, could be a lot shorter than that if your $40,000 is a roof and siding, right? That's a pretty quick one. Okay. Um But here's what our calculator said. I'm at a 6.75% rate on my commercial lending options right now at the time that I'm recording this. Maybe that's different when this actually gets released. But I don't think it's going to go higher than that anymore. I think we're trending in the opposite direction. So that breaks out to $36.99 per day. And how I figured that out was just using this little per Diem calculator here. So you'll see on here, those of you guys listening on the calculator or watching this, down here on the daily interest, I've got $36.99 for the daily interest rate. Okay. Points are origination fee. So the lender that I typically use for commercial lending, they charge a $2,000 loan origination fee, no matter what the price is of the loan. And then they'll have an appraisal fee. So typically about $500. So I put in $2,500 there. The closing costs, I always factor about 1.3% on the buy side and 1.3% on the sell side. So usually in Wisconsin, our buy side closing costs are going to be a lot lower than that. But because we typically offer to pay the closing costs for the seller, I factored a little bit higher on the buy side of a percentage. And then closing costs on the sell side, 1.3%. That's pretty standard for when you go to sell a property. Okay. Estimated insurance, I just threw 400 bucks in here, 500 bucks for utilities over that time frame. Property taxes estimated $1,500. Some of these are probably high, some are probably low. Again, it's going to be pretty minor. And then I've got my purchase price again, $200,000, my rehab budget of $30,000. Oops, I need to change that to $40,000 because that is what we said on our other one. And profit after expenses after all of that stuff comes out to $31,000. So this calculator that this buy box, this quick math, 90% ARV minus rehab, pretty accurate in this example. Again, now some of these factors can change. If I'm using hard money, maybe I would only be at $25,000 profit after expenses or something like that. Point being, we're pretty darn accurate here with this number. So if you're not offering those things, uh, or if you're not able to offer the way that I showed you guys, my point here today is just to show you that you are missing out on a lot of money. That's $25,000 to $30,000 that you missed out on because of the way that you run your numbers. Plain and simple. Okay. And like we talked about today, if you have another extenuated circumstance that says, I have to offer this way, this is the only way I can make it work. Let's talk, right? Let's get on a call with me or Reese from our team and let's unpack that a little bit because there are other ways that you can make these deals work. I don't want to see you guys missing out on $25,000 or $30,000 just because of the way that you offer. Okay. So hopefully today's episode is helpful, guys. It's a little bit shorter than typic, typical episodes, but I think I wanted to just make this point today for those of you guys after having that phone call with somebody on our team. And um, if you're not on our buyers list yet, I encourage you to go to Wisconsin Discount Properties.com, fill the information out, and then uh usually Connor from my team is the one that reaches out to you and has that conversation to just start to unpack your situation, right? And have conversations like this. And then we also have Reese who's there to um go deeper with you guys if you need to go deeper on your own personal situation. We can set up an actual consultation call with you. Okay. So check that out. All right. Again, if you guys are listening to the show, you're getting value, go to YouTube, follow it. If you're listening on Audible or Spotify, awesome. But go to YouTube, follow us, subscribe, and commenting on there is super helpful, guys. And let us know what you need help with. That's what we're here for. We're here to help. I'm here to help you guys. I want to do future episodes that are relevant to your situation, to your struggles. I want to help you guys take your real estate investing to that next level. All right. So appreciate you guys tuning in. Appreciate you guys consistently following this episode or these shows and listening to the episodes. And um, I will continue to keep rocking these as long as I keep hearing back from you guys that they're valuable and they're making a difference. So thanks for tuning in. We'll see you on the next episode.

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Corey Reyment

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