Member left our seven-person group and took the shared buyer list with him

The export wasn't your problem, the shared record was. I run a small team and we learned this the hard way with a different kind of contact list. What we do now is every contact has an owner field and nobody sees another owner's phone numbers, only the buy box and the last three purchase types. So you can say "I have a buyer for 3/2 brick, sub 180, cash, closes in 9" and route the deal, and the actual person stays with whoever built the relationship.

That's basically your Option B with better plumbing, and it survives someone leaving because there's nothing worth exporting. The thing you'd lose is speed. Routing through a human adds hours.

What was the list actually worth though? You said 40 have closed and 12 repeat. If the guy left with 340 rows, 300 of them are dead weight he's now going to burn out with blasts. Feels like the damage is to the 12, and you know exactly who those 12 are without any software.

In Option A, who is holding the assignment fee at close and how long between the wire hitting and the contracting member getting paid? That's the part that blows up partnerships. If you're taking 25% off the top you're also the one explaining to a part-timer why his $6,300 is four days late because title batched the disbursement.

I'd want that written down before I'd want the 25% written down.

Is there anything in writing right now between the seven of you? You describe splits and export rights like they're house rules. If the answer is no, the option you pick matters less than the fact that the next person to leave will also do whatever they feel like.

Option A concentrates the single biggest failure point of the whole group into one person who also has his own pipeline. You get sick for two weeks and 2.2 closings a month stop.

Separate thing that bothers me: you say 40 of 340 have closed with the group. Do you know that from your own closing statements or from members saying so? I've seen "buyer lists" where a third of the names are other wholesalers who were going to relist it anyway. Before you price your dispo service at 25% I'd want to know how many of those 40 were true end buyers.

There's a third shape you didn't list and it's the one I'd want to build. Somebody who isn't a member does the dispo. Flat per deal, no percentage, no contract in their name, no buyer list of their own to protect. Then the argument about who owns the buyers stops being an argument about money.

Whether a non-member can be paid per deal for that work without a license depends entirely on what they're doing and which state, so that's a call to a real estate attorney in your state before anyone quotes a price. But the structure removes your conflict.

Buying small multifamily is my end of this, and I'm on maybe six wholesaler lists locally.

What killed it for me with one group was exactly what your buyer complained about. Same property, two senders, two prices, four days apart. I stopped opening both. Not because I was offended, I just assumed neither of them controlled the property. Your Option A fixes the thing that actually costs you buyers. The 25% question is separate.

cairn is right about the duplicate emails and it's worse than he's saying. Once I've seen a house twice from two people I mentally mark the whole street as picked over.

Working through licensing coursework right now and the thing your Option A brushes against is real. Marketing someone else's contract, for a cut of the fee, when you're not a party to that contract, is exactly the fact pattern several states have been writing rules about, and the rules differ state to state on whether an assignment interest counts and what disclosure the seller gets. Your state rewriting them is the reason to ask a licensed attorney there rather than the group chat.

One structural thing that sometimes changes the answer: if you're actually a party to the contract, by joint venture or by being an assignee, the analysis isn't the same as marketing on behalf of a stranger. Still a state-specific question.

Option B, and stop trying to make the number bigger. 30% of something that closes beats 50% of a deal that dies in dispo because nobody could route it.

How does a member decide it's worth posting a deal to the group at all? If I contracted something and thought I had a decent shot alone, giving up 30% before I've even tried seems like the last resort, which means the group only ever sees the ugly ones.

beacon just said the thing I was circling. Adverse selection. The deals that reach the shared pool are the ones the finder already failed on.

Quarry, on your 11 closings, how many hit the group after the contracting member had already marketed it solo for a week?

The 340 number is doing a lot of work in this post and I'd bet half of it is people who filled a form out in 2023 and never bought anything. Every list I've kept decays faster than I think. When I actually called through mine last spring, a quarter of the phone numbers were dead.

If you take Option A, what happens on the week you have three of your own contracts and two members' contracts at once? You've priced 25% against an average of 2.2 closings a month, but the work doesn't arrive at 2.2 a month, it arrives in clumps. I'd want to know what the worst week looked like before I signed up to be the only pipe.

Different angle. Whoever runs dispo also ends up being the one asked to front earnest money when a part-timer is short. Ask now whether that's part of the 25% or a separate arrangement, because it will come up and it will come up at 6pm on a Friday.

Running your numbers.

11 closings, $8,400 average, $92,400 gross to the group over 5 months. Option A gives you $23,100 of that, call it $4,620 a month. You say you'd cut your own acquisition way back to do it. What did your own acquisition produce in those 5 months? If you personally contracted 4 of the 11 at $8,400, that's $33,600, and you'd be trading a bigger number for a smaller one plus a lot of email.

The only way A pays is if your presence in dispo raises the group's close rate enough to grow the pie. You have one data point suggesting it does: the duplicate-marketing deal cost $4,900 of fee. If that kind of leak happens twice a quarter across seven people, centralizing recovers maybe $20k a year, and your 25% of that is $5k. That doesn't cover your lost acquisition either.

So A works if the group's volume roughly doubles under one dispo desk. Does it? That's the assumption the whole option rests on and you haven't tested it.

Ledger, could he just do Option A for one month as a trial and count?

Let me make sure I have the mechanic right. The contracting member signs a purchase contract with the seller, then a buyer pays a fee to step into that contract, and the fee is what gets split. So in Option A quarry never signs anything, he just finds the buyer. Is that the whole difference?

juniper, that's the mechanic, and it's also why halyard's point bites. The person who signs nothing and gets paid for finding the buyer is the person the state rules are aimed at, and it varies by state which side of the line that lands on.

Reading this like a screening problem. You have 340 applicants and 12 tenants who actually pay. You wouldn't rebuild the list, you'd rebuild the 12.

Disagreeing with ledger, or at least with what people will do with his math. Thin-margin volume work doesn't reward the person who optimized the split, it rewards the person whose deal gets to a real buyer first. I've lost more money to slow dispo than to bad splits, and it isn't close. Last year I gave away 50% on a deal I could have kept 100% of, because the other guy's buyer closed in 8 days and mine wanted 30 and an inspection.

quarry, the duplicate pricing thing is the actual bleeding. Fix that first even if the fee arrangement stays ugly for a quarter.

flint, when you gave up 50%, was that agreed before the other guy saw the deal or after his buyer bit? Because the after version is where every one of these groups seems to fall apart.

Nobody answered my trial-month question, so I'll ask it better. Is there a reason you can't run Option A on the next four contracts only, at 25%, and compare close rate and days to assign against your last four? Then Thursday's call is a decision about an experiment instead of a permanent structure and the two guys threatening to walk have something to look at.

marlow's version is what I'd do, with one addition. Write down before the trial what number would make you say no. Otherwise you'll finish four deals and argue about interpretation.

What stands out to me reading the whole thread is that the 12 repeat buyers are the business and everything else is administration. If the guy who left has relationships with three of those 12, he took three. If he has relationships with none of them, he took a spreadsheet.

What makes me answer a wholesaler on my own rehabs is that his scope numbers survive a walk. One group I get emails from has a member who puts a real photo set and a line-item repair estimate on everything, and I open his even when the address is junk. That's a group asset too and it's cheaper to build than a buyer list. If you go Option A, standardize what goes out. The consistency is worth more to buyers like me than knowing which of you signed the contract.