Most investors decide what to do with a property after they have it under contract. That is backwards, and it is why deals get held that should have been sold and assigned that should have been kept.
The exit determines your maximum offer, not the other way around. A wholesale, a flip and a rental hold each support a different number on the same house, and knowing which one you are pursuing before you make the offer is what keeps you from writing a contract that only works for a strategy you cannot actually execute.
Each Exit Prices the Same House Differently
A wholesale is priced by what your buyer needs to make it work, minus your fee. You are effectively bidding on their behalf and taking a slice, so your ceiling is the lowest of the three.
A flip is priced by after repair value minus repairs, holding, selling costs and your required profit. Higher ceiling than a wholesale, because you are capturing the margin rather than sharing it, and it demands capital and execution.
A rental hold is priced by what the property produces, not what it resells for. Sometimes that supports a higher number than a flip, because you are not paying selling costs and you are underwriting decades of income rather than a single transaction. Sometimes far lower, in a market where prices have run ahead of rents.
Which is the practical point: a house that makes no sense as a flip can be a perfectly good rental, and vice versa. Running only one set of numbers means systematically passing on deals that work under a different exit.
What Actually Decides It
Your capital. The first and most honest constraint. No money means wholesaling, whatever the spreadsheet says.
Your capacity. A flip is a project. Contractors, decisions, site visits, and a timeline that slips. If you have a day job or you are already running acquisitions at volume, taking on a renovation is taking on a second business.
The renovation scope. Light cosmetic work is a manageable flip. A full gut with structural issues is a different risk profile, and if your estimate came from photographs rather than a walkthrough the uncertainty is larger than it looks, per estimating a rehab you have not walked.
The neighborhood. Areas with strong resale support flips. Areas with strong rental demand and softer resale support holds. These are frequently not the same streets, and local knowledge decides it more than any formula.
The numbers themselves. Run all three. A deal that clears comfortably as a wholesale and marginally as a flip is a wholesale, and the temptation to reach for the bigger number is how people end up with a project they did not want.
Your tax position. Flips and wholesales are generally treated as ordinary income, holds are treated differently, and the gap can be substantial. This is genuinely specific to your situation and worth an accountant rather than a rule of thumb.
Decide Before You Offer
The practical sequence, once you have a defensible ARV and repair estimate.
Calculate the maximum offer under each exit. Wholesale using your buyer's requirements minus your fee, which is the arithmetic in the 70 percent rule. Flip using the component buildup. Hold using rent, expenses and financing, per rental property analysis.
Then eliminate the ones you cannot actually execute. Not the ones you would like to execute. If you have never managed a renovation and have no contractor, the flip number is theoretical.
Offer at the highest number among the exits that remain. And write the contract so the exit you chose is available: assignable if you are wholesaling, a diligence period long enough to verify if you are renovating, and financing arranged if you are holding.
The Hybrid That Usually Works
Most operating investors run more than one exit, and the sensible pattern is volume in one and selectivity in the other.
Wholesale the majority, which keeps cash flowing and requires little capital, then keep the occasional deal that is genuinely exceptional. The discipline is in the word occasional: keeping the good ones is how portfolios get built, and keeping the ones you failed to sell is how investors end up with a garage full of problems.
The honest test for keeping one is whether you would have bought it deliberately at that number, not whether you struggled to place it. A property you could not assign is usually telling you something about the price rather than presenting an opportunity.
Where People Get Caught
Deciding the exit after the contract, which frequently means discovering the contract does not permit it. A non-assignable contract on a deal you intended to wholesale forces a double close you may not be funded for, as covered in assignment versus double close.
Using retail comps to justify a hold, or rent estimates to justify a flip. Each exit has its own valuation basis and mixing them produces a number that supports nothing.
Underestimating holding costs on a flip, which accrue whether or not the work is going well and are the variable most often optimistic.
And keeping a property because it did not sell. That is the most expensive version of this mistake, because it converts a marketing problem into a decade-long commitment.
And if the constraint turning out to be binding is your own hours rather than your capital, that is a different decision, worked through in when to hire your first acquisitions person.
Whichever you choose, record which exit you underwrote and what the numbers were, then record what actually happened. That comparison across a dozen deals teaches you more about your own market than any framework, and it only exists if it was written down, which is the argument in the guide to the real estate investor CRM.