Pooled buyer lists versus private lists with routing: what actually holds up in a small wholesaling group

Question

@tonyv88 a five-person group running on a shared buyer spreadsheet for a few months, with everyone able to pull from and add to roughly 140 names, tends to work fine right up until two members market the same contract to the same buyer within hours of each other at two different prices. That kind of collision teaches a buyer to distrust every number from the group, since they learn to wait for a lower one to show up. The two structures worth weighing: A pooled list favors speed. A contract with a short inspection window doesn't have time for a routing conversation, and hitting every buyer at once moves fast deals faster. Private lists with routing, where each member keeps their own buyers and posts a deal to the group for the member with the right relationship to take, splitting the fee, protect the relationship itself. A buyer only ever hears one number from one person, which preserves trust and doesn't train buyers to wait for a better offer. The cost is a day or two of routing time, and it depends on members actually being reachable. A middle structure that tends to hold up reasonably well: the top ten or so relationship buyers stay private to the member who built them, while the rest of the list stays pooled. It captures most of the speed benefit of pooling without exposing the buyers most likely to notice and react to price inconsistency. Whether that middle version survives a genuinely tight deadline usually comes down to whether the group has actually agreed on who owns which relationships before the deadline hits, not after.

dmitri_248 · Accepted Answer

@megan_doyle15 that's the fourth poll option and it fails for the same reason honor-system rules usually fail, which is that the incentive to break it peaks exactly when the deadline is closest. A member with a contract expiring Friday at 5 will call the buyer he's told not to call, and he'll be right to, because his fee is on the line and the etiquette rule is worth nothing to him. Private lists with routing is the version worth writing, and it needs to be written, not agreed to verbally. Three things need to be on paper before it means anything. First, what a deal posted to the group is, with a timestamp, because the split fight is always about who saw it first. Second, the split percentage fixed in advance rather than negotiated per deal, since per-deal negotiation is where a two-day routing delay turns into a five-day one. Third, an escape hatch. If the relationship owner hasn't produced a signed buyer within some stated number of days, the deal goes to the pool and the routing split drops. That last piece is what makes the model survive a 14 day inspection period, and without it @tonyv88 is right that the hybrid dies on a Tuesday. On the compliance side, be careful how a group like this describes itself in writing. Marketing another person's contract to buyers for a share of the fee can look like brokerage activity depending on the state, and licensing triggers for that vary a lot state to state. Get any arrangement like this in front of a real estate attorney in each state the group operates in before anyone signs. A discrepancy like the $4,000 gap is a symptom. Two people with authority to quote the same asset to the same buyer will eventually quote different numbers no matter how careful they are.

karen_whitfield · Answer

The buyer waiting a day is the part that should worry you more than the $4,000. You taught him something and he learned it. That's slow to undo.

I've bought land from small groups twice and both times what made me pick up the phone was that the same person always called me and always knew what I'd said no to last time. Pooled lists produce strangers pitching me alfalfa acreage because my name is in a column. I stopped answering one of those groups entirely.

megan_doyle15 · Answer

Genuinely asking, why can't the shared sheet just have a column that says who owns the relationship and a rule that you check it before you call? Seems cheaper than rebuilding five separate lists.

tashaford30 · Answer

@dmitri_248 the escape hatch is the part that makes the private list version actually work. Voting for routing. One thing worth adding for @tonyv88: whoever owns the relationship should be the one who tells the buyer the group exists. Finding out by being double quoted is the worst possible way to learn it.

Pooled buyer lists versus private lists with routing: what actually holds up in a small wholesaling group

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