I'm about to pick the wrong fee structure between two investor clients

The two products aren't the same thing and I'd stop comparing their revenue directly. The filtered list is data. The worked lead is sales. Data scales because you do it once and sell it four times. Sales doesn't, because every call costs you the same twenty minutes it cost last week.

If you go the list route you're competing with anyone who can write a scraper against the same filings, and in a lot of counties that's a lot of people. The calling is the part that's hard to copy.

Three structures, three different businesses, and the constraint that decides it is exclusivity.

Worked leads at $750 on delivery are priced as exclusive information. The moment you sell a filtered list of the same filings to four subscribers, the exclusivity is gone, because two of those subscribers will call the same owners you were going to call, and your delivered lead arrives at client one having already been contacted twice. He'll notice within a month. Your $4,500 in eight weeks is at risk in a way the $800 a week doesn't compensate for unless the subscriptions hold.

Subscription income also behaves differently from fee income. Four subscribers at $200 is $41,600 a year gross if nobody churns, and lead subscriptions churn hard, because a buyer who goes three months without closing from your list cancels. Price that at 50% annual churn and you're constantly selling.

The hybrid that avoids the collision is territorial. Sell the filtered list, but sell it by geography, one subscriber per defined area, and keep the areas your worked-lead clients buy in off the subscription market entirely. Smaller total addressable market, no cannibalization.

On client two, the $3,000 at close looks like more money at a 20% acceptance rate. It carries his financing risk and his timeline, and you have no control over either. Compare the two on cash per hour worked, not per lead delivered, since the close-fee model makes you wait through a period where you're still spending $310 a week.

Whether a fee contingent on a closed transaction requires a license varies by state, and your attorney call is the right place to settle that before you commit to any structure.

$750 on delivery with no close fee is better than it sounds and I'd protect it. I've paid both ways and the delivery-fee people are the ones who answer my texts on a Sunday.

Also, client two buying one in five isn't him being picky, that's a normal ratio and you should expect it from anyone. Don't read it as your leads being weak.

The thing that jumps out at me is 40 to 55 notices a week filtered to 12. What's the filter costing you in misses? Owner-occupied plus an equity screen throws out the tired landlord with a 90% loan who'd do a subject-to or a short sale, and some buyers want exactly those. Might be a second product for a different client rather than a leak.

Not the answer you're looking for, but $2,500 in costs against $4,500 in revenue over eight weeks with all that phone time on top would make me stop and ask whether the two counties are big enough. Everything in your post is a structure question and the underlying volume might just be thin.

Whatever you pick, the document matters more than the price. Two things I'd want written: what counts as delivery, and what happens when the same address arrives at your client from another source in the same week.

On the subscription version, a written territory clause and a no-resale clause. Subscribers pass lists around, and a $200 a week list gets forwarded to a friend by month two if nothing stops it. You can't really stop it, but you can make cancellation the consequence.

The list business is the one that still exists in five years if you keep the calling attached to it. Selling raw filings alone puts you in a price war with a scraper by next spring.

Let me redo the numbers, because I think the $800 a week is flattering itself.

Subscriptions: 4 x $200 = $800/wk, costs $310, gross margin $490/wk, and your time drops to maybe 5 hours of pulling and filtering. That's $98 an hour.

Worked leads to client one: 6 leads over 8 weeks at $750 = $4,500, costs $2,480, margin $2,020 over 8 weeks, so $252/wk. Your hours are what, 15 to 20 a week with the calling? Call it 17. That's $15 an hour.

So the subscription looks six times better per hour. The number that breaks it is churn plus the ceiling. Four subscribers is probably close to the whole market for that data in two counties, so you cap out around $41k a year and there's nowhere to grow without adding counties. The worked-lead business has a low hourly rate and no obvious ceiling if you find buyers who pay more than $750.

What's your actual weekly hours? Everything above swings on it and you didn't say.

Worth remembering that pre-foreclosure filings in some states are a matter of public record with a defined timeline and in others the notice process looks nothing alike, so a subscriber in a neighboring state may not value your product the same way. Confirm what your counties actually publish and when, since that timing is most of what you're selling.

ledger's hourly comparison is the useful thing in this thread. I'd add that the calling hours have an option value the spreadsheet doesn't capture, which is that eventually one of those 6 sellers will want something a flipper can't offer and you'll be the one standing there with note experience.

I'd run both for six weeks and let the data decide, which I realize is what I say about everything.

windlass, running both is exactly what he can't do here, that's the whole problem. The subscription poisons the exclusive leads. It isn't two experiments, it's one experiment that destroys the other one while it runs.

The $1,100 ask is right and the part people skip is that you have to be willing to hear no. I raised my management fee on a fourplex client last year fully expecting to lose him. He signed the same week. You never learn where the ceiling is by staying under it.

Is $750 really low for a seller who says they'd take an offer? I haven't done a single deal yet, and that sounds like a lot of money for a phone number to me. Trying to calibrate.

ember, it's not for the phone number. It's for the eight weeks of filings, the filtering, the mail, and the 13 conversations that went nowhere before the 6 that didn't. The buyer's paying to skip all of that and to get there before the mail crowd does. Whether $750 or $1,100 is right depends entirely on what that buyer makes on a house, and on a flip clearing $40k it's rounding.

One practical thing nobody's said. Before you raise the price on client one, deliver two in a row that are unusually good. Doesn't have to be planned, just don't make the ask in a week where the last thing you sent him was a tire kicker. I've had that conversation from both sides and timing moves the answer more than the argument does.