A master agreement or a fresh agreement per deal for a wholesaling group
A common structuring question for a small group of wholesalers operating informally and looking to formalize after a string of closed assignments and a couple of costly disputes. The choice is between a single master agreement and a fresh agreement per deal. A master agreement, signed once by everyone, defines the referral split, who controls disposition, what happens to a shared buyer list if a member leaves, how earnest money gets funded and reimbursed, and a dispute process, with individual deals running under it via a short deal sheet naming parties and split. The advantage is that recurring problems like list ownership and earnest money get solved once instead of repeatedly, and new members inherit settled answers rather than renegotiating from scratch. A fresh agreement per deal, with no standing document, lets two or three members working a specific contract sign a short JV or referral agreement covering that contract only. The advantage is flexibility, since deal types can vary widely and a master agreement written at one point in time can become a poor fit for a very different deal later, and nobody signs anything they did not read for a deal they are actually in. One real risk with a master document is that, depending on the state and the specific facts, it can start to look to an attorney like it describes an entity or a securities arrangement rather than a simple referral group, which is exactly the kind of question that needs a licensed opinion in that state before either version is signed. The tradeoff ultimately comes down to which failure mode a group would rather manage: recurring disputes over things a per-deal agreement never covers, or the risk of an overbuilt master document that doesn't fit every deal.
Master agreement or per-deal papers for a six-person wholesaling group?
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