Took 40 percent for introducing a tired landlord to a wholesaler

The 300 to the tenant is the detail I'm keeping. Five years of running service calls and the number of jobs that stall because a tenant won't open a door is absurd. Paying them something is cheaper than everyone's time.

The mechanism worth separating here is the source of your 8,800 and the reason a closing agent cares about it.

In most JV wholesale structures the fee arrives one of two ways. The assignment or the resale creates a spread at closing, and the settlement statement disburses to whichever entities the parties instructed. Or one party receives the whole spread and pays the other under a separate written JV agreement after funding. Both happen. The first puts your name in front of the closing agent, the buyer's lender if there is one, and anyone reading the file later, which is usually the version that survives scrutiny. The second leaves your claim resting on a contract with your partner and nothing else.

What determines which is available to you is not preference. It depends on how your state treats compensation paid to an unlicensed person for procuring a seller, and states differ sharply on where that line sits between finding a lead and brokering. @marlow, the 350 you spent is the right sequence, and whatever your attorney tells you is good for your state only.

Your outcome also rests on your partner's buyer being real and vetted before he signed the seller. Your fee never depended on your own buyer relationships, your marketing, or your capital. That is the whole trade in a JV: you accept a smaller share and in exchange your dead-deal cost is near zero. If that partner's buyer pool were thin, the same 40 percent would have paid you nothing across three attempts. Ask him how many contracts he signed last quarter and how many closed. That ratio prices your share more honestly than the percentage does.

Managing units for a living, the 780 against a 1,350 market is the part I'd have flagged to the buyer before he ever asked about the roof. A tenant at that rent with a landlord who stopped answering the phone is not a tenant who signs a new lease at market. Whoever bought it is either doing a cash for keys or waiting out a term. Did the buyer price that in, or did he spend his one concession on a roof he couldn't see?

@meridian's earnest question is the one I'd want answered too. On the lending side of things the first thing I look for in any two party split is what happens to the paperwork when the money doesn't arrive.

How long from the yard sale conversation to the closing? I ask because the version of this I'd be doing involves knowing three or four people like her over a few years, and if the cycle from conversation to check is six weeks it's a very different thing from six months. Also, did she know what the resale price was? I'd be uneasy running into her afterward if she found out later, and 22k over 141k is not a hard number to find out about, though a dozen or so states don't publish sale prices at all so it depends where you are.

@anchor that's the piece I've come around on with small multifamily too. Every deal in your own neighborhood is a deal you have to live next to afterward. @marlow if she ever asks, what's your answer?