$95 a month in dues against 20% of the fee, and I ran both

Two networks in my area, same size, roughly the same buyer coverage, opposite pricing.

The first charges $95 a month flat. Access to the shared buyer list, the group chat, a monthly call where people go through state rule changes. Nobody takes a cut of anything. If you close nothing you still owe $1,140 a year.

The second is free to join and takes 20% of any assignment fee on a deal where you used their buyer list or their dispo help. Deals you source and sell entirely on your own are yours.

I'm working out what my first deal costs, so I built the crossover. If my average assignment fee lands at $6,000, 20% is $1,200 per deal. One deal a year and the flat fee is roughly a wash. Two deals and the percentage group costs $2,400 against $1,140, so flat wins. Three deals and it's $3,600 against $1,140 and flat wins badly.

That math says flat fee unless I close almost nothing. But the assumption doing all the work is that both groups deliver the same dispo help, and I don't believe that. The percentage group only gets paid when I get paid, which means they have a live reason to answer my texts on a contract that's sitting at day 19. The flat fee group has already been paid and has eleven other members. I've heard from two people in the flat group that posting a contract gets you polite silence.

So the question is whether aligned incentive is worth $1,200 to $2,400 a year in extra cost, or whether that's a story I'm telling myself to justify the more expensive option. Also possible that at low deal volume neither structure matters much and I'm optimizing a rounding error against the cost of not having a deal at all.