What does a landlord become when a wholesaler uses their contact list as the buyer side of a JV?

Three hours for 10k sounds incredible until you said the part about your name. Is there any version where you introduce him to two people and take nothing, just to see how he behaves on a live deal?

The question to walk into the attorney's office with is narrow. Ask whether compensation contingent on procuring a buyer for a property you hold no equitable interest in triggers the broker licensing statute in your state, and whether being a member of the JV entity that holds the contract changes that analysis. Those are two different questions, and the answer to the second one is why a lot of these arrangements get papered as an LLC with both parties as members instead of as a referral fee. Ask to see the JV agreement he uses now, before you give him an answer. How a person's paper treats the dead deal case says more about them than the split does. If the document is silent on who eats the earnest money and who talks to the seller when things go sideways, he has not had enough go sideways yet.

70/30 in his favor is wrong for what you're bringing. He has a stale list, which means he has a disposition problem, which means his contracts are worth a fraction of what he thinks without you. I'd open at 50/50 and expect to land at 60/40. The three hours framing is what's getting you, you're not selling three hours, you're selling the only thing that makes his 138k contract into money.

Does the roof number come from him or from someone who actually climbed on it? Two full turns plus a roof on a 1970s four unit is exactly where a 12k surprise shows up, and it lands on thicket's buyer while the wholesaler is already paid and gone.

Kestrel is right to ask. On a 1970s four unit the roof is rarely the expensive part. If it's original galvanized supply lines or a shared 100 amp panel feeding four units, your turn cost doubles and nobody quotes that from the driveway. I'd want a walkthrough before your name goes on the forward.

The veto is the important half and I don't think it's a split question at all. Write it in that you review every property before it goes to anyone on your list, and that reviewing means you get inside. If he balks at that, the answer is no regardless of the percentage.

Run the buyer's side and see if 172 is even real. 138 plus roof at say 14 plus two turns at 12 each is 176 all in before holding, on a 1970s all one bed four unit. A buyer paying 172 for that and then spending 26 to 30 on top needs the stabilized value well north of 210 for it to be worth doing. In a lot of small markets one bed units rent at a discount that caps value cold. So the real question isn't the split, it's whether the likely buyer walks this and comes back at 158. If that happens, the spread goes from 34k to 20k and a 30 percent cut is 6k. That's the number worth deciding against, since a first deal in a JV almost never closes at the pitched price.

If one buyer out of forty would probably buy it, that isn't a buyer list working, that's a single phone call. Worth knowing that before deciding what the list is worth.

Something here doesn't add up for me. Is the risk to your name really the deal falling apart, or is it that your people find out you got paid for the introduction and didn't say so? The second one seems worse and easier to fix.

Juniper's put a finger on it. Disclose the fee to the buyers up front, every time, in writing in the same email as the deal. It costs nothing with people who trust the source, and it removes the one thing that would actually damage the relationship. Some buyers will still want a discount for knowing. That's fine, it's priced in. Sextant's 158 scenario is the one worth underwriting to. At 6k the whole arrangement stops being interesting enough to risk anything on.

Small point from a low price point market. Forty contacts sounds like a lot until three are needed at once. Do this repeatedly and the list burns at whatever rate the wholesaler's deal quality drops, without any control over that quality. The veto wren described is the only real lever, and it only works if it actually gets used, including saying no to the second and third deal sent over.

One deal, at 50/50, with the walkthrough requirement in writing, and a plain statement upfront that the second deal's terms depend entirely on how the first one closes. Saying that out loud costs nothing, and if the wholesaler needs an answer this week on a 70/30 with no diligence rights, that answer says everything that needs to be known.