What actually makes a bird dogging lead worth paying for
Take someone driving older neighborhoods on weekends, noting houses that look neglected, peeling paint, tarps on roofs, mail piled up, and building a list of maybe 90 addresses. An investor who buys small houses offers to pay for leads, 20 a month, fee to be worked out later, and the natural question that follows is what makes a lead worth paying for. The investor's answer, a motivated seller, is true but not actionable on its own, since motivation is not visible from the curb. A list of addresses with owner names pulled from public assessor records, with no phone numbers and no contact made, is really just a prospecting list, not a lead in the sense most buyers mean. The more valuable deliverable is a qualified lead, meaning an owner who has been reached and has said something indicating interest in selling, timeline, or price expectation. Before committing to a volume of leads per month, the deliverable should be defined in writing: is the job to hand over addresses, or to make contact and pass along interested owners. Those are very different services at very different price points, and letting the buyer default to whichever is cheapest without specifying it in writing tends to produce disputes later. Starting with the address list and pricing it modestly, then renegotiating once contact and qualification are added, is the more reliable path than guessing at a package price up front.
