Nine weeks of dues to a shared buyer list, four contracts marketed, zero assigned

Writing this down while it's fresh because I would have wanted to read it in January.

I joined a group that ran off a paid chat, $199 a month, and the main draw was a shared buyer list of about 900 names covering my metro. The pitch was that I'd bring contracts and the group's buyers would take them, so I wouldn't need my own dispo for the first year.

What happened. I paid three months, $597 total. I got four properties under contract over nine weeks. All four went out to the shared list. Zero assigned.

The step where it went wrong was earlier than I thought at the time. I never checked who was on the list. When I finally started calling the names instead of emailing them, roughly the first twenty I reached were other wholesalers. They weren't buying, they were forwarding my deal to their own lists and trying to add a fee on top. So my contract went out at $155k and by the time it reached an actual rehabber it was $168k and he'd already seen it from two other people. Two of my four deals ended up circulating like that. The other two were priced wrong and no list would have saved them, which I only understood after a buyer walked one with me and pointed at the roof.

Cost: $597 in dues, $1,000 in earnest money on the third contract that I'd agreed to make non-refundable to win the seller, and nine weeks. The $1,000 is the part that stings, because I made it hard before I had a single buyer conversation on the property.

What I'd do differently. Before joining any group, I'd ask for five buyers on the list who closed a purchase in the last six months, and I'd call them myself to ask what they actually bought. If the organizer can't or won't produce that, the list is a mailing list. And I wouldn't agree to non-refundable earnest money until I'd talked to two buyers about the specific property, whatever that costs me in seller goodwill. My contract terms and what my state allows in that kind of contingency is something I should have had an attorney explain to me once, up front, instead of copying a template.