Sent 34 leads to one investor over four months, paid on none

210 hours for zero is rough. The bit that jumps out at me is that you never asked for feedback. Twelve owners said they'd consider selling and you don't know what happened to any of those twelve? That's the information you needed most and it was free.

Close-only isn't a bad structure. It's the normal structure with a stranger. What's bad is close-only with no written definition of what counts as your lead and no record of delivery. I'd sign close-only tomorrow if it said in writing that any property I introduce is mine for 12 months from the date of the email.

And get him to reply. One word. That's the whole protection.

Two closes in four months from a flipper who's taking free leads from you tells me his volume is low. You were feeding somebody who wasn't buying much. Even with a perfect agreement your ceiling there was maybe 2,000 for the period. Wrong client before it was a wrong contract.

Question rather than an answer. Did you ever ask him how many houses he bought the year before you met him? I ask because I'd want to know that before I gave anyone a single hour, and I don't think I would have thought to ask it at your stage either.

Run the arithmetic on the deal you accepted. 1,000 per close, no fee per lead. For that to pay 40/hour on 210 hours you need 8.4 closes in four months from 34 leads, a 25% close rate. Nobody converts flipper leads at 25%. The structure was underwater at the volumes you could physically produce, and that was knowable on day one.

@sextant that's the right frame but I'd push on the 40/hour. At 34 leads and 210 hours you're spending 6.2 hours per lead delivered, which is very high for address-plus-conversation. Either the driving radius was too wide or the skip tracing was eating the day.

@thicket what was your hours split between finding candidates and reaching owners? If it's mostly the first one, the fix is a better filter, not a better client.

Small thing that isn't small. Photos. If you sent one exterior photo per lead and he's a flipper, he's looking at that photo for scope, and a house that looks cosmetically tired in a photo can be a full gut. He may have passed on plenty of yours for reasons you'd have agreed with. Ask for the reasons.

You paid 760 and 210 hours for a lesson about paperwork. That's an expensive tuition but it's not the worst version. The worst version is doing this for two years.

@pike's sequence is what I'm copying. I'm still building a list and I was about to hand it to the first person who said yes. Getting the buy box in his own words first is obvious now and wasn't ten minutes ago.