Fifty-fifty of the spread or a fixed dispo fee on a $40k deal?

From the outside the fixed fee reads like a job and the percentage reads like a business, and I'd take the business.

I price service work for a living and the thing that killed every flat fee I ever quoted was the deals that don't close. If one in three assignments falls apart, your $7,500 is really $5,000 average per file you touch, and you did full work on all three. A percentage has the same mortality problem but at least the survivors pay you more.

Where I've landed for my own quoting is a percentage with a floor. Say 40 percent of the spread with a $4,000 minimum. The floor stops the tiny deals from being charity and the percentage keeps you honest on the big one. Ember, the part I'd nail down before structure is who controls the price the buyer pays. If the acquisition side can accept an offer without you, a percentage is a fee somebody else sets.

The thing that would decide it for me is how many deals the partner can actually send. One-off, take the percentage. Twelve a year with real consistency, I'd trade some upside for a fixed number and build my process around a known figure per file.

Also worth being blunt about what the 50 in 50/50 is buying. If he's bringing the contract and you're bringing the buyer, that's symmetric. If he's bringing the contract and you're also fixing his title problems, chasing the seller for access, and rewriting his comps, then 50 percent of the spread is you subsidizing his sloppiness.

I've done nine of these now on other people's paper and I've moved twice. Started at 50/50, dropped to a tiered split, and the tier is what stopped the fights.

My numbers: on spreads under $15k I take 50 percent, $15k to $35k I take 40, above that 30 with a $12k cap on my side. Sounds like I'm giving away the top end. What it actually did was make the acquisition guys stop hiding their good deals from me. Before the cap, the two most productive wholesalers I work with were sending me their $9k junk and taking the $45k deals to a buyer they half knew, then blowing a two-week close because the buyer wasn't real. I lost more to that than the cap costs me.

The assumption underneath all of it is that your buyer network is genuinely faster than theirs. If a deal that sits with them for nine days moves with me in 36 hours, the split argument mostly goes away because the seller isn't walking. If you can't demonstrate that speed gap, you're negotiating over a service they think they could do themselves.

Keystone's cap logic is the most interesting thing in this thread, because it treats the split as a way to change what deals get sent to you rather than as a way to divide one pie.

One mechanical point nobody's raised. How you get paid interacts with how the deal is papered, and that varies by state. An assignment where your fee shows on the settlement statement is a different conversation with the end buyer than a separate joint venture payment between you and the wholesaler, and some states and some closing agents handle those very differently (a few buyers will refuse to close if they see two fees on one statement). Whichever split you pick, have a real estate attorney in the state where the property sits look at the paperwork once, then reuse it. I'd hate to see you win the fee negotiation and then lose the fee because the closing agent wouldn't cut the check the way your agreement assumed.