Got licensed mid-course. Now the investor I scouted for won't pay.

The timing is the brutal part. You were doing the same activity on Tuesday and Thursday and the rules about how you get paid changed underneath you. I've watched this happen to two people and in both cases the brokerage was the immovable object, not the state rule. Brokerages write policy stricter than the statute because they're the ones holding the license.

So the useful question isn't only what your state allows. It's what your specific brokerage allows, in writing, before you hang the license there.

I'd push back gently on calling this a loss. You learned the compensation rule while it cost you $800 instead of at a hearing. That's a cheap version.

The part I'd think about longer is whether the scouting was ever going to fit with the license. Once you're licensed, the same work has a name and a form and a broker's signature on it, and it pays differently. Some people find that better. Some find they were happier unlicensed with flat fees and no supervisor. Worth deciding on purpose rather than drifting.

The lesson I'd take from this is narrower than most of the replies here. Your investor changed the terms because his own risk changed, and there was nothing on paper to stop him. If you'd had a signed one-pager from before you enrolled, covering that specific lead, he might still have refused, but you'd have had a conversation instead of a decision handed to you.

Get the agreement per lead, dated. It doesn't solve the licensing question. It solves the being-told-no-afterward question.

$95,000 verbal from an out-of-state owner with a code violation posted is a genuinely good piece of work, and it's a shame the payment mechanics ate it. Did you ask him whether the brokerage would allow it once you're actually hanging the license, or did the conversation end at no? Sometimes the answer is that it's allowed with disclosure and paperwork, and sometimes it's a flat prohibition, and those are different futures for you. Your commission and the brokerage are the only ones who can tell you which.

The document question interests me more than the deal. What you had was an oral arrangement for a fee contingent on a closing, which is the category of agreement most likely to be unenforceable or at least unprovable, and in some states agreements about compensation tied to real estate transactions have their own writing requirements on top of that. Which is a lawyer question in your state, not a forum one.

What I'd write for you going forward, if the licensing side allows any of it: one page, names the property by parcel number, names the fee, names the trigger, dated and signed before disclosure of the owner's contact. That's the whole document. The reason to date it is exactly your situation, where your own status changed mid-stream and the date of the agreement is the fact everything hangs on.