$3,500 on one probate lead after nine months of getting nothing right

The part I want to understand is the $3,500. Was that number in the one-pager as a flat fee, or a percentage that happened to land there? I'm starting from zero and every number I see quoted for a finder's fee is somewhere between $500 and $5,000 with no explanation of what moves it. Also curious how many of those 19 notes you'd have needed to mail before you stopped, if none of the six calls had gone anywhere.

Six callbacks off 19 handwritten notes is a 31 percent response rate, which is four or five times anything I get on volume mail. That's the handwriting and the fact that probate mail volume in your window is lower. It won't hold if you scale it, so don't build a plan on 31 percent.

The executor call is the real content here. I had almost the same conversation and I answered the price question, said something like "honestly around 120 is fair." Nothing came of it, no complaint, but I've thought about it since and I don't do it anymore. The temptation is enormous because you can feel the deal wobbling and one sentence steadies it.

On the response rate, @flint has the mechanism right. Response to probate mail moves with how many other mailers hit the same filing, and your four to seven month window is chosen to sit behind the first wave. As more operators use court-sourced probate data, that window narrows, which is the competition pressure that comes with better tooling.

The executor conversation is where the whole structure of your fee rests. A bird dog who passes information sits outside brokerage activity in most states. Answering "what should you list it for" and "should you accept his offer" is advising a seller on the terms of a sale, and whether that crosses into unlicensed brokerage depends on your state's statute and how your commission reads it, so that specific question is one for a real estate attorney in your state rather than a forum. Redirecting her to the buyer and to her own counsel is the behavior that keeps the role clean.

On the economics, your $3,500 against a $118,000 purchase is roughly 3 percent, which is on the higher end for a pure lead handoff and reflects that you delivered the executor identity, the heir situation, and the motivation, not just an address. The answer to @ember's question depends on which of those the investor could have found himself. Court probate data plus skip tracing gets him names. It does not get him the sentence about the contents of the house mattering more than price. Price your fee against the part that isn't in the data.

One accounting note: a finder's fee is income, and how it is reported is a question for your tax professional.

The four to seven month window is the transferable idea in this post and it generalizes past probate. On tax-delinquent parcels I found the same shape, there's a period after the first delinquency notice and before the county publishes the sale list where almost nobody is contacting the owner. Once the list is published you're competing with everyone who bought the list.

Different timeline, same logic. Find the interval where the record exists and the mailers haven't arrived. And it moves every year as more people work the data, so whatever window you find, expect to have to re-find it.