My crew keeps texting me vacant houses, and I don't know what to do with them

The 9 out of 12 with a different mailing address caught my eye. That's the signal a lot of paid lists are built on and you got it free off a job site. Before any app, would you just call or write those 34 and see what happens? You'd learn more from three phone calls than from a form.

Paying somebody for a tip that leads to a transaction is exactly the area where states draw lines, and they draw them differently. Some allow a flat finder's fee for a bare introduction, others treat compensation tied to a deal as activity that needs a license. I'd get an actual answer from an attorney in your state before you print a rate card, because the fix is easy now and expensive later.

On the incentive question, quality gets worse first. I've seen it in a referral program on the service side. Pay per tip and you get every empty house in the county including the ones already listed, already sold, and the one that's empty because the owner is on vacation. Pay on outcome only and the good guys stop bothering after the third tip that went nowhere, because they can't see why.

What actually worked was small money on a qualified tip, meaning it passed a checklist, plus real money on close. The checklist did the filtering, not the price.

Don't build an app. A phone number and a text-in template gets you the same thing this week. Address, photo, one line on what they saw. If you get 20 a month for three months you'll know whether there's anything here, and by then you'll know what the app needs to do instead of guessing.

The part I'd think hardest about is that these guys are your working relationships. If the program pays out slowly or unevenly, you've put money in the middle of something that was working fine on goodwill. Not saying don't, just that the cost isn't only the $50.