Choosing a fee structure for bird dogging pre foreclosure leads
Take an operator who came to bird dogging almost by accident, having started by reading pre foreclosure filings for note leads and finding those filings worth more to house buyers than to a note investor. A workable setup looks like this. Pull weekly filings across two counties, roughly 40 to 55 notices combined. Filter to owner occupied, single family, equity that clears the loan by a decent margin, which knocks the list to about 12 a week. Mail those, then call the ones that answer. Over eight weeks a filter like this typically produces around 19 conversations and 6 sellers who would genuinely entertain an offer. One buyer structure pays a flat fee, say $750 per lead delivered, no fee at close. Clean and fast, paid every time. A second buyer prefers nothing per lead and a larger fee at close, say $3,000, closing perhaps one in five of what is sent. On 6 leads that is roughly 1.2 closings and $3,600, slightly more money, six weeks later, contingent on financing. Hard costs for data and mail run near $310 a week, about $2,500 over eight weeks against roughly $4,500 from the flat fee buyer. That is a job, barely. The more interesting structure is a weekly retainer for the filtered filing list itself, before anyone calls a seller. Two investors offering $200 a week each puts four subscribers at $800 a week for work already being done once, with no calling required. The tradeoff is that the leads become non-exclusive, which can push existing flat fee or at-close buyers to walk. One more thing worth confirming before committing to either path: whether a fee paid at close triggers licensing requirements, since that varies by state and is worth a call to an attorney before signing anything. The real decision is whether to keep selling worked leads to one or two buyers, or sell the filtered list wide and step out of the calling business entirely.
