The spread is margin, not noise
On a deal with $38,000 of spread, a $6,300 exclusion you did not price is a sixth of it — before the holding costs of the two extra weeks it takes to sort out.
For house flippers
A $6,300 exclusion eats a quarter of your spread.
You are not comparing three prices. You are comparing three different jobs that happen to have prices attached. RehabRocket lines them up trade by trade so the cheapest number is the cheapest job.
$99 per property. No subscription, no seat, no annual.
Whole-house rehab — 1408 Sycamore St3 bids
| Scope | DelgadoDelgado Construction2questions | VanceVance Remodeling4questions | KowalskiKowalski & Sons1question |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fixtures & appliances | $2,400 | excluded | $3,900 |
| Permits & fees | $1,850 | not mentioned | $2,100 |
| Dumpster & haul-away | $1,650 | not mentioned | $1,900 |
| General conditions | not mentioned | $2,400 | $2,800 |
| Items total | $61,400 | $48,900 | $81,000 |
Amber is silence — the bid never mentions it. Grey is a disclosed exclusion, which is a different and far safer position. The lowest Items total belongs to the bid missing two of these four.
The arithmetic
You underwrote the rehab at $48,900.
Every line below was in one of the other two bids and absent from the one you signed. None of them were flagged as exclusions. They were just not there.
That is $10,200 against a deal you underwrote on a $38,000 spread — about 27% of the profit, discovered one line at a time between week three and week nine, when there is no leverage left to renegotiate anything.
See this in a real comparison| Purchase | $142,000 |
| Rehab — the bid you signed | $48,900 |
| Permits, nobody priced them | +$1,950 |
| Dumpsters, three not one | +$1,640 |
| Appliances, marked owner-supplied | +$2,710 |
| Supervision, billed separately | +$3,900 |
| Rehab, actual | $59,100 |
Why flippers use it
Three reasons, all of them numeric.
An evening, not a weekend
Three bids, four minutes of extraction, then you are reading a table instead of building one. The spreadsheet you were going to make on Sunday is the thing this replaces.
It costs per deal, like everything else
$99 against a $180k rehab is a rounding error on the title fees. You already budget per property — this fits where your brain already is.
“I’ve done twelve flips. I know what a bid should say.”
You do. That is not the part that fails. What fails is checking three bids against forty line items at 11pm on the night before you have to answer a contractor who is holding a start date.
Knowing that permits should be in there does not help if permits are absent from bid B and present in bids A and C, and bid B is nine pages long, and you have read all three twice already. This is the checking, not the knowing.
You still make the call. It just makes it in front of a table instead of a stack.
Rentals and BRRRR
Scope that appraises, priced before the clock starts.
A refinance is decided by what the appraiser can see. Bids that quietly drop the items that move value are a different problem from bids that are simply expensive.
The mechanics are the same as a flip — normalise the trades, find what is missing, ask the questions — but two things matter more.
- Holding costs run while you sort out a scope gap. Two weeks of arguing about who pulls the permit is two weeks of interest on money that is not producing.
- Anything a bid quietly drops — a bath that stays a half bath, flooring that stops at the hallway — comes out of the appraised value the whole refinance is built on.
- Multiple properties means multiple projects, and the per-project price is the same each time. No seat count, no tier.
RehabRocket does not calculate ARV, run the 70% rule, or model your refinance. It reads the bids. Deal analysis is a different tool and there are good ones.
Questions
What flippers ask.
What counts as a project?
One property address. Up to 25 bids inside it, grouped into as many comparisons as you need — budget and task tracking included, no expiry.
Is this a subscription?
No. It is $99 once, per property. If you never flip another house, you never pay again.
Does it cost more if I add bids later?
No. A fourth bid three weeks in, a second comparison for the roof, a re-run after a contractor revises their number — all included, up to the project's 25-bid limit.
How many bids can I compare at once?
Two to five in a single comparison. Below two there is nothing to compare; above five the table stops being readable on a laptop. You can run as many separate comparisons as you like inside one project — one for the kitchen, one for the roof — up to 25 bids in the project overall.
What if the deal falls through?
The project stays in your account. There is no expiry, so if the same house comes back around — or you want the comparison as a reference for the next one — it is still there.
Does it tell me which bid to pick?
No, and it shouldn’t. Cheapest is not a recommendation when one bid excludes permits and another includes the tile you chose. It shows you what differs, flags what’s missing, and writes the questions — the call is yours.
The next deal is where this pays for itself.
Look at the demo first — three bids, already loaded, no account.