I paid four bird dogs for 14 months and only kept the one who never sent an address

I hit this exact wall from the other side. I'm the buyer, not the funder, and nobody prices the triage cost. My rule now is I'll look at three open leads per person and the fourth waits until one of the first three closes or dies. It cut my volume and raised my close rate, because the sender does their own filtering when the slot is scarce.

Your Dog D is the whole business though, and you can't hire for that. Four closings out of nine is a 44 percent conversion on relationship information. My best year on data-sourced leads was under 3 percent.

@juniper she was adding nothing, that's Canton's point. The list was purchasable by anyone.

What interests me is whether Dog D can be built rather than found. He got that fourplex lead from a baseball dugout, but the underlying thing is that he's known in a small geography and people tell him what's going on. Anybody who wants that has to pick a small area, stay in it for years, and be the person who hears things. That's slow and it isn't systematic and it's also the only part of this that data tools can't copy.

The line I keep re-reading is that Dog A was profitable at $1,000 per close because her marginal cost per lead was near zero. That's the incentive problem in one sentence. If sending costs nothing, volume is a rational strategy for her even though it destroys value for you.

Doesn't that mean any flat per-close fee eventually attracts spray-and-pray senders? You need something that costs the sender to send, or a slot cap like @keystone described.

You already found the structure, you just described it as a fee schedule instead of a screen. Tier by information content and the tiering does the filtering for you.

The cleaner way to think about it is what the lead saves the buyer. An address off a purchasable list saves nothing except the list fee, call that $2 to $5 of value, so a $1,000 flat fee on a close is you paying a thousand dollars for five dollars of work plus luck. A named owner with a verified reason for selling and a phone number that connects saves the buyer the mail campaign, the skip trace, and the twelve dead calls before the live one. That's real hours and it's why Dog D's leads convert at 44 percent.

So write three tiers. Tier one, address plus visible distress, $250 to $500 on close. Tier two, address plus current owner contact confirmed good, $750 to $1,000. Tier three, owner has said in words that they'd consider selling and here's why, 1 to 3 percent of purchase price. Publish the tiers to all four dogs. Dog A either stops sending 212 resold addresses or she starts making calls, and either outcome is better than what you had. Dog D moves to tier three and stops being underpaid, which matters because he is the person most likely to walk.

One thing to watch on tier three. "The owner said they'd consider selling and here's why" is close to the edge where a lead-finder starts to look like he's soliciting a listing, and where that line falls depends on your state's licensing statute, so have a real estate attorney in your state read your tier definitions before you hand them out. The fee structure is fine. The words you use to describe the tier three activity are what matter.