A member left a seven-person wholesaler group and took the shared buyer list, and the group has to pick a new structure
A common setup for a small wholesaler group is a shared buyer list, split across mostly part-time members, run through something like a shared spreadsheet. Say seven members with 340 rows, but only around 40 have actually closed something with any member in the last 18 months, and 12 of those are repeat buyers. Export rights get handed out because it is easier than arguing about it, and that is usually the mistake that surfaces later. On five months of volume: 11 closed assignments across the group, average fee 8,400 dollars. Five of those 11 were cross-referred, meaning one member contracted a deal and another member's buyer took it, split 50/50 on the fee. That cross-referral is the part that actually works. Solo, most part-time members close one deal a quarter and half of those die in dispo. The risk shows up when a member leaves. A full list export on the way out, followed by that member marketing to the same names independently, creates exactly the collision a shared list was supposed to prevent: two buyers hearing about the same property from two different senders in the same week, with the price moving between emails and a fee compressed well below what the deal was modeled at. Groups in this spot generally choose between two structures. Option A, a hub model. One person runs all dispo, every contract in the group markets from one address at one price, and nobody else touches the buyer list. The hub takes a cut, commonly 25 percent, off every fee, with the contracting member keeping the rest. On five months of volume that might be around 23,100 dollars for handling roughly 2.2 closings a month, though it usually means the hub cuts back their own acquisition to run it. Option B, no shared list at all. Every member owns their own buyers, nothing gets exported, and a deal gets posted to the group for whoever brings a buyer, at a reduced split like 30 percent instead of 50. Slower, but nothing walks out the door when someone quits. The open questions worth working through before committing: whether a hub model starts to look like brokering other members' contracts, which is a licensing question that varies by state and is currently being rewritten in several of them. Whether the hub's cut is worth more than that person's own acquisition time. And whether a 30 percent split in Option B is enough to make a busy part-timer actually open their phone, or whether the referrals simply stop.
