Is bird dogging a real business in a rural county with forty vacant houses and no local investors?

5 percent isn't a standard, it's a number someone made up. Percentage fees show up sometimes but they're usually on bigger commercial stuff, not a 100k single family. On your price points I'd expect flat fees in the few hundred to low thousands.

The investor drought is the real question. Two hours out is a long way for a metro flipper to manage a rehab crew.

Taking your terms one at a time, because they matter and the loose usage floats around a lot.

Off-market means the property isn't listed for sale with an agent on the MLS, the multiple listing service that agents use to advertise properties. That's the strict meaning. Loosely, people say off-market to mean "a deal nobody else knows about," which isn't the same thing. A vacant house with an owner who has never thought about selling is off-market in both senses. A property listed last year that expired is off-market in the strict sense and probably known to plenty of people.

Skip tracing means finding current contact information for an owner whose address on the tax record is old or wrong. Consumer-facing skip trace services generally charge per lookup, often somewhere in the range of a few cents to a dollar or two a name depending on volume and provider, and pricing changes, so check current rates directly. You don't need it to start. County tax records give you a mailing address for free, and a letter to that address works often enough.

On fees, flat amounts in the several hundred to low four figures are what people describe at your price points. There's no standard rate.

The part that's going to decide this for you is beacon's point about distance. Before you spend anything, call three or four investors in that metro and ask if they'd buy in your county at all. Some will say no because they can't supervise a crew that far out. If the answer is no from everyone, your leads have no buyer and the rest of this doesn't matter. Landlords who buy and hold sometimes travel further than flippers do, so ask both kinds.

Ask the small local banks too. A loan officer at a community bank in a county like that knows exactly who has been borrowing to buy and fix houses there, because the bank wrote the paper. Nobody hands over a client list, though a plain question about who is active in the market tends to get an answer.

I had to reread the off-market part twice. So a house can be off-market and also completely picked over, because five other people already mailed the same owner? That changes how I was thinking about it. I assumed off-market meant I was the only one who knew.

Hollow, when you say 40 vacant houses, do you actually know they're vacant or do they just look neglected? The mail thing seems like the only real signal in your list.

Forty addresses is an inventory. The business is what happens after the first ten letters get no answer. On the rural question specifically, check the tax delinquency list at the county treasurer's office. Availability and format vary by state, and some counties charge for the file. In a 90 to 120 thousand market the delinquent owners are often out of state heirs who do not want the property and cannot sell it easily. That is a more useful list than driving, and it is cheap or free. Vacancy says nobody lives there. Delinquency says somebody has stopped paying, which is a different and better signal.