What makes a probate lead worth a fee, illustrated by a four to seven month filing window
A pattern worth studying in bird dogging: sourcing leads from probate filings at the county courthouse, in person where the docket is not published online in usable form, which varies significantly by state and even by county. Filings from roughly four to seven months back tend to be the productive window; newer than four months and a family is often still settling immediate matters, older than a year and most wholesalers in the metro have typically already sent several letters. Pulling filings in a single sitting, matching them to real property, and mailing handwritten notes rather than yellow letter templates, offering to connect the family with a local buyer who purchases as-is, tends to produce a small number of real responses among the no-thank-yous and already-listed properties. The useful case is often a modest single-family home with several out-of-state heirs who care more about not dealing with the contents of the house than about squeezing every dollar from the price. Passing that lead to an established local buyer, with a signed one-pager on the fee before any name changes hands, is standard practice, and a $3,500 fee on a deal that closes near $118,000 is a realistic outcome for that kind of introduction. The point worth flagging: if the executor later asks the bird dog what to list the house for or whether to accept an offer, the correct answer is to decline to negotiate price or advise on the sale and redirect the executor to the buyer and to her own attorney. That boundary, between finding a lead and brokering a sale, is exactly where a state's licensing statute draws the line, and it is worth knowing before that call happens rather than during it.
