What happens when 34 leads go to one investor over four months with nothing in writing
A common pattern, laid out factually, because it repeats. A new bird dog gets introduced to a flipper through a local meetup. The flipper says he pays 1,000 on any lead of his that he closes. No fee per lead, no retainer, nothing up front. That sounds fine to someone with no track record, who reads the close-only arrangement as the price of getting started. Four months. 34 leads delivered by email, each one an address, an owner name, a photo, and whatever came out of a conversation on the doorstep or over the phone. Twelve of those owners say directly they would consider selling, which looks like a good hit rate. The flipper closes two houses in that window. Neither is one of the 34, or at least that is what he says, and there is no way to check. Total paid: zero. Costs on the bird dog's side: 640 in gas, about 210 hours, and a 39 a month skip trace subscription for three months. Call it 760 in cash and a part time job's worth of hours. What goes wrong is that nothing is in writing at all. No fee agreement, not even an email acknowledging receipt of a specific address. So there is no version of this where anyone can establish that a given lead came from him. There is also a version where the flipper was straight the whole way and all 34 leads were genuinely bad, which cannot be ruled out when nobody ever asked for feedback on a single one. The fixes are cheap. Get the fee arrangement in writing before lead number one. Get a short acknowledgment for each lead sent, even a reply saying received and logged. Ask every month which ones got passed on and why. The open question is whether close-only is simply a bad structure for someone with no track record, or whether it works fine and the problem was the person on the other end of it.
