He wants 20 leads a month. Qualified how?

Go back and ask. Twenty a month of what is the entire deal. I've watched people deliver 20 addresses to someone who wanted 20 conversations and then get called unreliable for it.

Ask him one question: what does a lead have to include before you'll pay for it. Write his answer down and read it back to him.

The address-only version is worth a lot less and you should know that going in. Anyone with a phone and a spare Saturday can produce tired-looking houses. The scarce part is the owner who says out loud that they want to sell.

I'd rather deliver 5 leads a month where I actually spoke to the owner than 20 addresses. Fewer, better, and he'll come back.

Watch the calling part. Whether you can contact owners to solicit a sale, and how, gets into state licensing and solicitation rules, and it varies by state, so check yours or ask an attorney licensed there before you dial anybody. That's not me dodging, it's genuinely different in different places.

Operationally: pick one deliverable, define it in a sentence, and price that sentence. "Address, owner name, verified mailing address, and a note on condition" is a product. "Leads" is not.

90 addresses off condition alone is going to be full of houses where the owner is fine and just doesn't paint. I've been in enough of those houses through work. Tarp on the roof means a claim went badly, not always that somebody wants out.

Quoting a volume before I knew my own throughput is what cost me most in the five years I've been running a service business. You don't know yet how many hours 20 leads takes you. Commit to 20 and you'll either work 30 hours a week for beer money or you'll pad the list with junk.

Tell him you'll do 8 this month at a set fee, both of you look at what happens, then talk volume. If he won't do a small first batch he's not a client, he's a hope.

@lantern I keep going back and forth on this. If the talking-to-owners version is where the money is, at what point are you basically wholesaling and just not getting paid like a wholesaler?

@beacon I had the same confusion reading about this. As I understand it the bird dog hands the lead over and the investor does the negotiating and contracting. The wholesaler gets the property under contract themselves. So the line is whether you ever sign anything with the seller.

@verity your 40 mailing addresses might be the most useful thing you own right now, more than the 90 drive-bys.

Ask him what he bought in the last six months and where those came from. If his last three came from an agent and a wholesaler, you're being asked to fill a gap he doesn't actually feel yet, and he'll lose interest by month two.

On the pricing question you didn't quite ask: per-lead and per-close pay for different things. Per-lead pays you for work, per-close pays you for accuracy. If you have no idea yet how many of your leads convert, per-lead protects you and he'll push back on it for exactly that reason.

Also track your own conversion from day one even if he never asks. Six months from now that number is your whole negotiating position.

I'd write down what you think a lead is, send it to him, and let him correct it. Easier than getting him to define it from nothing, people are much better at editing than authoring.