Five months in a nine-person referral group looking for hands-off income, made $1,150

Is the coordination itself a payable job though? Nine people, shared list, someone has to stop two members calling the same seller and keep the buyer list current. That sounds like a real function with real hours. Not passive either, but it's a seat that doesn't depend on you personally finding a house.

I'm still fuzzy on the mechanics. When you say your share was 15% of a $6,000 fee, where does that money physically come from? Is it a line on the closing paperwork, or does the member who assigned the contract get paid and then send you $900 afterward? Those seem like very different levels of safety and I can't tell which one you had.

The labor is the product. That's it. There's no version of this where a fee appears because somebody found a phone number. The fee exists because someone talked a seller into a price, held a contract, and found a buyer inside the inspection window, and each of those is hours.

marlow, your $340 a month is the part I'd have quit over in week three. Fixed cost against variable income you don't control.

vellum, both versions exist. A share can be disbursed at closing if the closer will pay a third party off the settlement statement, or it can be paid member to member afterward. The second is common and it is unsecured, which is where most of the disputes in this room come from. Whether a closer in a given state will disburse to a non-party varies, so that gets confirmed with the closer before the contract is signed.

marlow, the reason your seat got repriced is structural rather than personal. A wholesaling fee comes from putting a property under contract and assigning that contract to an end buyer. A network makes that happen more often by spreading the functions around, so lead generation sits with some members, buyer relationships with others, and earnest money with whoever will fund it. Every one of those seats is hands-on work, which is why this is active income by definition. The seats that get the biggest share are the ones holding the scarce thing, and in most markets right now that is the buyer relationship and the ability to close inside the window. Lead flow is the most reproducible input, so its share drifts down.

The whole answer depends on one assumption: whether your lead source was genuinely yours. If your leads came off the group's shared list, you were doing work anyone in the group could do, and 15% was already generous. If you had a source nobody else could reach, you were underpaid and should have priced it per deal rather than as a percentage.

One more thing to check with an attorney in your state, since it varies: whether being compensated for referring sellers into contracts touches your state's brokerage licensing rules.

How long before you knew? I move slowly on everything and my worry with something like this is that five months is exactly the length of time it takes to feel like quitting would waste what you already spent. Was there a signal at month two you could have acted on?

Same lesson shows up on the capital side. Being the smallest, least essential slice in somebody else's active business means your terms get revisited every time their economics tighten, and you find out by email. The people who hold up are the ones supplying something the operator can't easily replace.

Running your numbers. 11 hours a week for 22 weeks is 242 hours. $1,150 in, $2,900 out, so negative $1,750 across 242 hours, about negative $7 an hour before you count the driving.

For the seat to have paid you $40 an hour you'd need roughly $12,600 of net income on those hours, so about 14 closed deals at your $900 share, or the same two deals at a share nobody would ever agree to. The arithmetic says referral-only doesn't work unless you're feeding a lot of deals or you're not carrying the dues. What would you have needed to see at month two to leave, a deal count?