How to Calculate ARV (After Repair Value) Like a Pro

After Repair Value — ARV — is the single most important number in a wholesale deal. Everything else flows from it: your maximum allowable offer, the spread you're selling your cash buyer, and whether the transaction is viable at all. Get ARV right and your deals work. Consistently underestimate it and you scare away buyers. Overestimate it and you burn buyers, damage your reputation, and watch deals fall apart at assignment.

This guide covers the mechanics of calculating ARV correctly, the adjustments that matter, the common mistakes that cost wholesalers real money, and how to run comps efficiently at volume.

What ARV Is (and What It Isn't)

ARV is what a property will be worth after it has been fully repaired or renovated to a condition competitive with similar sales in the neighborhood. It is not the current as-is value. It is not the list price of anything. It is a forward-looking estimate of market value in a specific condition.

The distinction matters because your cash buyer — the rehabber or landlord who purchases your contract — is underwriting the deal against ARV. They need the ARV to be defensible because their lender, if they use one, will require an appraisal. That appraisal will use comparable sales. If your ARV can't survive an appraisal, the deal dies at funding.

A reliable ARV is built from recent, genuinely comparable sales, adjusted for meaningful differences. Everything in this guide is aimed at producing an ARV that would survive that appraisal.

The 70% Rule and Why It Matters

Before getting into the mechanics of comps, it's worth understanding why ARV is so central to the math. The most common underwriting formula in residential wholesale is:

Maximum Allowable Offer (MAO) = (ARV × 0.70) − Estimated Repairs

At 70% of ARV minus repairs, a typical rehabber has room to cover acquisition costs, holding costs, rehab overruns, selling costs, and still exit with a profit. Different buyers use different multipliers — some aggressive buyers go to 75% or even 80% in hot markets; others cap at 65% for high-risk properties — but 70% is the standard starting point.

Your assignment fee lives between your MAO and the price you put the property under contract for. If your ARV estimate is inflated, your MAO is inflated, you overpay, and your buyer's numbers don't work when they run their own comps.

The formula is simple. The hard part is getting ARV right.

Step 1: Define the Comparable Sale Criteria

Start with the tightest reasonable filter and expand only if you can't find enough sales.

Time window: Most appraisers and sophisticated buyers use the last 6 months. In slower markets you may need 12 months, but note the time gap explicitly — a 10-month-old sale is less reliable in an appreciating or softening market.

Geography: The goal is same-neighborhood comparables. Start with a 0.5-mile radius. In dense urban markets, you may tighten to 0.25 miles. In rural or sparse suburban markets, you may expand to 1–2 miles, but only after exhausting the tighter radius. Never cross major geographic boundaries (a highway, a railroad, a school district line) unless you have no choice — and if you do, disclose it.

Property type: Match the subject property exactly. A single-family detached does not compare to an attached townhome. A two-story colonial does not compare to a ranch-style house of the same square footage unless they're in a neighborhood full of mixed styles.

Bedroom count: Appraisers treat bedroom count as a primary filter. A 3-bedroom comp for a 4-bedroom subject will need a substantial upward adjustment. Stick to the same bedroom count, or one bedroom off with a clear adjustment.

Condition: You're selling a renovated ARV. Your comps should be sales of fully updated properties — new kitchens, updated baths, modern finishes. Sales of homes in as-is or fair condition will anchor your ARV too low. Ask the listing agent or check the MLS remarks if you have access; otherwise, pull listing photos for the comp sale if they're still available.

Step 2: Pull the Sales

The most reliable data sources for comps, in order:

MLS (Multiple Listing Service): If you have direct MLS access through an agent relationship or a licensed salesperson on your team, this is the gold standard. MLS data includes days on market, original list price, price reductions, and condition notes — context that raw county recorder data doesn't give you.

County recorder / public records: Available to everyone and captures every arms-length sale. The limitation is that it lacks condition information and often lags by 30–60 days in filing.

Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com: Useful for markets where you don't have MLS access. Redfin in particular tends to be accurate on recent sales and provides useful filters. These are secondary sources — they're aggregating public records and MLS data with varying lag times — but for a quick sanity check or in markets where you're running blind, they're far better than nothing.

Your own comparable sales database: If you're running significant volume in a specific market, your own historical data on what sold and what sold fast is genuinely valuable. Build a running log.

Step 3: Make Adjustments

Raw sale prices are starting points, not answers. The adjustment process is where ARV gets refined into something accurate.

The standard adjustment methodology is additive: for each material difference between your subject property and the comp, add or subtract from the comp's sale price to bring it in line with the subject.

Square footage: Appraisers calculate price per square foot from similar comps to determine a $/sq ft adjustment. If comps are trading at $150/sq ft and the comp has 1,800 sq ft while your subject has 2,000 sq ft, the comp is adjusted up by $30,000 (200 sq ft × $150). Don't use the raw $/sq ft of the comp itself — use the marginal value of square footage derived from multiple comps.

Bedroom and bathroom count: The adjustment varies by market but is typically $5,000–$15,000 per bedroom and $3,000–$10,000 per bathroom. Derive these from actual sales pairs in the same neighborhood rather than using textbook numbers.

Garage: In most suburban markets, a two-car garage attached is worth $10,000–$25,000 over no garage. The value is market-specific — in dense urban neighborhoods where nobody drives, it may be negligible; in car-dependent suburbs, it's substantial.

Lot size: Only material when lot size varies significantly. A 2,000 sq ft difference in lot size in a typical subdivision is worth nearly nothing. In a market where lots are scarce or where lot size enables subdivision or ADU potential, it can be significant.

Location within the neighborhood: This is harder to quantify but essential to acknowledge. A house on a busy arterial street vs. a quiet cul-de-sac in the same neighborhood can differ by 5–10% in value. Back-of-the-lot, backing to commercial, adjacent to power lines — these all pull value down. Note them explicitly.

Condition and finishes: If your subject will be fully renovated but a comp was sold in updated-but-not-top-tier condition, the comp may need an upward adjustment. This is subjective and requires judgment — look at listing photos.

Step 4: Reconcile to a Single Number

After adjustments, you should have 3–5 adjusted sale prices. Don't simply average them. Weight them by reliability: more recent sales get more weight, comps with fewer adjustments (i.e., they're more similar to the subject) get more weight, and comps from the tightest geographic radius get more weight.

A reasonable reconciliation for a subject that produced five adjusted comps at $285,000, $291,000, $274,000, $288,000, and $293,000 might land at $287,000 — toward the middle but slightly influenced by the two strong similar comps at $288,000 and $291,000.

Express ARV as a rounded number, not a false-precision decimal. $287,000 is fine. $286,842 implies a level of precision the method doesn't support.

Stress-Test the Number

Before presenting an ARV to a buyer, run one sanity check: can you articulate exactly which three comps most support it and why? If you can't explain the number to a skeptical rehabber in 90 seconds, the number isn't ready.

Also check: what does Redfin's Automated Valuation Model (AVM) say? Zillow's Zestimate? These are rough proxies, not answers — but if your ARV is 15% above every AVM in the market, that's a signal to recheck your comp selection and adjustments, not necessarily to abandon your number.

Common Mistakes

Using active listings as comps. List prices are aspirations. Only closed sales count.

Crossing neighborhood or school district boundaries. If the 0.5-mile radius forces you to cross into a different school district, those comps may look numerically close but trade at a material discount or premium. The market respects these lines more than geography does.

Ignoring condition adjustments. Pulling comps that are "similar houses" without asking whether they were fully renovated or still had original 1990s finishes produces an ARV that's too low. Your subject will sell fully renovated — your comps need to be too.

Anchoring to the Zestimate. AVMs are useful for sanity checks but they're notoriously unreliable on distressed, vacant, or off-market properties — exactly the properties wholesalers work with most. Run your own comps.

Using a stale ARV on a relisted deal. If a deal fell out of contract and you're relisting it six months later, rerun the comps. Markets move.

ARV in the Offer and Assignment

Understanding the deal from both sides — what the contract states and how buyers evaluate your ARV — is critical to getting assignments done. For a deeper look at the contract mechanics, see Wholesale Real Estate Contracts: What You Need to Know in 2026.

The ARV you present in your assignment package should be documented: include the three or four comps you used, their sale prices, your adjustments, and the final reconciled number. Buyers who trust your comp work will move faster and pay more for your assignment fee. Buyers who have been burned by inflated ARVs will discount everything you present.

Running ARV at Scale

If you're sourcing leads at volume — working NOD lists, tax-delinquent rolls, and absentee owner campaigns simultaneously — running full manual comps on every inbound lead isn't feasible. Most experienced wholesalers use a tiered approach:

Tier 1 (initial screening): AVM check + 60-second visual scan of recent sales in the area. Enough to decide whether to pursue or pass.

Tier 2 (offer preparation): Full comp pull with adjustments, done before making any written offer.

Tier 3 (assignment package): Cleaned, documented comp analysis ready to present to buyers.

Deedfox pulls automated comps alongside lead data, so when a pre-foreclosure or tax-delinquent property surfaces, you can see a calibrated ARV estimate alongside the lead detail without switching tools. It accelerates the Tier 1 screening step materially, letting you focus manual comp work on the leads that have already cleared a basic threshold.

For more on sourcing the leads that make this math worth running, see What Is Real Estate Wholesaling? and How to Build a Cash Buyers List From Scratch — because the best ARV in the world needs a buyer at the end.

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The Deedfox Team helps wholesalers find and close more off-market deals.