A roofing call turned into a $1,200 finder's fee. I'm still not sure how.

The permission part is the piece I'd underline for anyone reading. I'm getting ready for a first rental and I've read a lot about screening and privacy, and handing someone's name and number to a stranger without asking is the kind of thing that goes bad in a way you never hear about, because the person just decides you're not trustworthy and you never find out. Asking cost you one sentence and it made the whole thing clean.

Why it was worth $1,200 seems clear enough to me. A letter has to first find someone who might sell, then convince them the sender isn't a scam. You skipped both. She already trusted you and she'd already told you she wanted to move, so the investor got handed a seller with a reason instead of a name on a list.

My question is what happens the next time and whether you want it to happen. Do you plan to ask this on every bid where the numbers don't work for the owner? Because at that point you're a roofer who is also sourcing, and I'd want to know how the two jobs interact before I built a habit.

I manage buildings and get versions of this constantly, and the thing that would worry me in your position is the roof bid you're holding. You told the investor your number was $14,400. If he then uses your bid to argue the price down with her, you're a party to both sides of a conversation about her house, and she thinks of you as her roofer.

Nothing you described sounds wrong to me. I'd just be careful that the repair number you give a buyer is the same number you'd have given her, and that she knows you shared it. That's a reputation thing in a small trade market more than anything else.

$1,200 on one call in a metro market. Out in the rural counties I look at, the whole house might trade for $60,000 and there's no investor within 90 minutes to hand it to, so the fee for the same call is a third of that or nothing at all. Worth saying because the numbers in these threads assume a buyer exists nearby who wants deal flow. Half my problem is finding the buyer, not the house.

The economic content of what you passed along was the repair estimate. An investor underwriting that house from the outside guesses the roof at somewhere between $9,000 and $20,000 and pads it. You gave him $14,400 from someone who was going to do the work, which tightens his number and lets him bid with less cushion.

That's why the fee was real. It also means your leads are structurally better than a driver's leads for as long as you keep bidding jobs, because you carry a scope of work that nobody else has. I'd write down every bid you lose on price. That list is a lead list and you already own it.

I'm mostly reading about notes and paper and I understand about a third of these threads, but the thing that landed for me is that the check arrived with no agreement because the guy is decent. That's the version most people don't get. I'd take @sextant's suggestion about the lost bids seriously, that's a list nobody can buy from a data vendor.