A buyer wants to swap 2.5 percent for a flat fee with a carve out for anything he sources himself.

The fix I've seen on the land side is a written introduction log. Any parcel either party puts in the log is inside the agreement for the term plus a stated tail, and anything not logged is genuinely his. Then the carve-out is real but it can't swallow the nine addresses he handed you, because the moment he asks you for comps you log the address and email him the log entry. Makes the trigger a document instead of an argument about who found it first.

Check how the flat fee lands on the settlement statement before you agree to the number. A flat buyer broker fee paid by the buyer at closing is treated differently by different lenders in the cash to close calculation, and on a $180k duplex with 20% down an extra $4,000 out of pocket can move his reserves under the line. Get the lender to say in writing how they will treat it rather than assuming.

The word doing the damage in his draft is "sourced." Nobody can define it after the fact. Replace it with a mechanical trigger: a property is covered if either party sends the other the street address in writing, and a property is excluded only if he has it under contract before he sends it to you. Then fix the tail. If the tail says "properties shown" and you never showed the nine mail leads because you underwrote them instead, the tail does not reach them at all and orchard's log is the only thing saving you.

Does your broker even allow a flat fee? Mine caps how far off the posted schedule I can go without a written exception.

Watch what happens after the carve-out closes. Properties that come in through a buyer's own mail campaign still need leasing and management afterward, and the analysis you did for free is what made him buy. If you are not the property manager, someone else is billing 8% of collected rent on a property your underwriting justified. A smaller flat fee with your name attached as the management referral is worth more than a fight over which mailbox the lead came from.

A $4,000 flat fee breaks in both directions and he knows which one he is betting on. A structure that holds up better is the greater of 2.5% or a $5,000 minimum, which stops the $90k single-family from paying less than the file costs to run. On the underwriting labor, bill it separately as a per-property analysis fee, $250 is a workable number, waived if the property closes. Charging separately for analysis can bump into what your state allows a licensee to bill outside a brokerage agreement, so ask your broker and check your state rules before building a fee schedule around it.

Nobody has priced the ratio yet. If it takes 15 underwrites and 6 offers to get one closing, a per-closing flat fee pays you for one file and eats fourteen. Cobalt's waivable $250 analysis fee is the only structure in this thread that tracks the work instead of the outcome. Put $3,000 flat with $250 per address logged next to his $4,000 flat with a free-analysis carve-out and let him choose which one he wants. The first is the better deal for you on almost any realistic ratio.