$11k building a park pipeline, paid on one of two closings

The percentage was your first problem, before the exclusivity language. Funds buying at this size don't think of origination as a percentage of price, they think of it as a cost per pad screened. A 1 percent fee on a $6.4M park is $64,000 for work that their internal acquisitions person does on salary, so the moment there was any ambiguity they had every reason to use it. A flat $150 to $250 per pad on close, or a fixed $15k to $25k per deal, sounds smaller and gets paid without an argument.

Second thing. Your notice mechanism is the whole agreement. The version I've seen work is that you submit a named park in writing, they have 10 business days to reject it as already in their pipeline with evidence, and if they don't reject it, it's registered to you for 12 or 18 months regardless of who else shows up later. That flips the burden. As you wrote it, you had to prove you were first, which is unprovable once a broker is in the room.

The assumption your whole campaign rested on is that sourcing was the scarce input. For parks under 50 pads it sometimes is, because the aggregators won't spend time there. At 118 pads with clean utilities, half the buyers in the country already have that owner in a CRM. Your mail was probably the fourth letter that owner got that quarter.

640 owners and 71 conversations is the part that stops me, and I have nothing yet. How did you even get a list of park owners? I assumed there was some directory and it turns out I have no idea where you start.

Going to ask the thing I'd feel dumb asking out loud. If you'd already had the license, would this have just been a normal commission and therefore collectible? Or does a license not change anything about whether the buyer owes you when they say you didn't source it?

I genuinely don't know which of the two problems was doing the damage here, the paperwork or the licensing status.

One client. That's the loss. You built a machine with a single buyer at the end of it and gave that buyer the sole right to decide whether you got paid.

I've done thin margin deal flow for three years and the only version that works is having four or five buyers who know each other exist. Then the park goes to whoever pays, and nobody argues about who touched the seller first, because there's another guy who'll close it Friday. You had no alternative outlet, so when they said no, your only option was to be sad about it.

$11,400 for that lesson is cheap, honestly. I paid more.

Three words in a contract cost you $64,000. I'm going to think about that every time I skim something.

Near miss on my side, smaller scale. I was feeding small multifamily to a buyer who paid $5k a door referral. Verbal. He closed two out of the three I brought and paid on both, and I'd like to say that was because we had an understanding, but really it was because he was decent and the deals were small enough that $10k wasn't worth a fight. If either one had been a $6M park I think I'd have your outcome, @halyard.

The piece I'd add is that you had documentation of the first call and it still didn't help you, because your contract never said documentation was the test. Evidence only matters if the agreement makes it the deciding thing.

What happened to you happens mechanically and it isn't personal. You mail a park owner who's been sitting on 118 pads for 22 years. Your letter is the first time anyone told him a number. He gets nervous, calls the broker who sold his cousin's storage facility, and now there's a broker in the file with a listing agreement.

So your mail created the transaction and then created the person who took your fee. The fix I've seen is that you don't leave a gap between the first call and a signed something. Not a purchase agreement, just a short exclusive negotiating window with the seller, dated. Whether that's enforceable and whether it's a licensed activity is state by state and worth an actual lawyer's read before you use it.

You still own the list. 640 owners with 71 of them warm enough to talk is an asset that took eight months to build and costs almost nothing to keep alive. Most of those owners are not selling this year and will sell inside seven years, because that's how age works.

I'd keep touching them twice a year with something that isn't an offer. My land list has produced deals four and five years after the first letter. The mistake would be to write off the whole campaign because the fee structure at the other end was bad, when the bad part was only at the other end.

@ember, on the list question, park ownership is usually findable through the county assessor and the state's manufactured housing or health department, since the community itself often holds a license or permit for the water system. Those lists are public in most places. Sale prices are the harder part, roughly a dozen states are non-disclosure and don't publish what anything traded for, so in those you're guessing at comps from cap rate chatter and whatever the seller admits.

@halyard, six states in one campaign seems like the deeper issue to me. You were paying for volume rather than knowing one region well enough that owners already recognized your name by the third letter.

The retainer is the part I'd want. Not because it's more money, because it changes what the relationship is. Nobody argues with the person they're paying monthly. They argue with the person they only owe money to at closing.

I'd rather have $2,500 a month for six months and a smaller success fee than a big number I might never see.

I had to reread the post twice to understand what exclusivity was even about. So "exclusively sourced" doesn't mean you were their only sourcing person, it means the deal had to come only from you and from nobody else? If a broker shows up later that somehow retroactively makes it not yours?

That seems like it can almost never be satisfied for a park anyone else has heard of.

Something to fold into the next campaign. The parks worth an aggregator's attention are usually the ones with vacant pads they can fill, and vacant pads only matter if the use is legal to keep filling. Plenty of older communities sit as legal nonconforming uses under the current zoning, and in some jurisdictions that status limits expansion or gets lost if the use lapses. That varies by ordinance and you have to read the actual code, not a summary.

If you can tell a buyer "41 occupied of 63 pads, use is conforming under the current code, here's the section," you're no longer just the person who found the phone number. That's a fee they don't argue about.

The thing I'd sell instead of sourcing is infrastructure diligence. Every one of these deals lives or dies on the water and sewer. Private lines under 60 year old parks, master metered with 25 to 30 percent unaccounted water loss, clay laterals with root intrusion, a package treatment plant somebody's cousin has been babysitting.

A scaled buyer will pay real money for a walk of the system before they commit, and they'll pay it whether or not the deal closes, because it's third party work rather than a contingent fee. You already had 71 owners letting you on their property, @halyard. That's the harder half.

I've been circling almost exactly this idea for a year, so this post saved me a version of the same eight months. The thing I hadn't considered is that being useful to a buyer and being paid by a buyer are two separate negotiations.

Dumb question, when you say 118 pads, does the buyer own the homes on those pads or just the land under them?

@flint, I don't think client concentration is the cause. He had one client and one client paid him on one deal, which is what a single client does. The cause is that finding parks isn't scarce.

Every aggregator over 20 parks has someone whose entire job is calling owners. What they're short of is people who can run the thing after close, collect from 118 households, and get a submetering program installed without a resident revolt. Sourcing is the input they can replace with a $58k salary and a phone list. That's why nobody defended the fee.

@rigging, just the land and the utilities usually, plus whatever homes came with the park as rentals. That's the whole appeal, you own dirt and pipes and the resident owns the depreciating box.

@halyard would you say what the mail actually looked like? I'm building a list of about 300 owners in two states and I'd rather not learn response rates the expensive way. 71 conversations out of 640 owners across four drops is better than anything I expected.

I pay finders on parks and I'll tell you how I write it, because it's the mirror image of what happened to you.

Flat fee per pad, $200, paid at close. Registration by email with the park name and county. I have 10 business days to say it's already mine and I have to show a dated record if I claim that. If I don't respond, it's registered for 18 months. If a broker turns up later and I end up paying a commission, the finder fee gets cut in half and still gets paid. Nobody has ever fought me on any of it, because there's no scenario where they get zero.

The reason I write it that way is selfish. Finders who get stiffed stop calling, and I'd rather pay $23,600 on a 118 pad park than have the next three go to somebody else.

@girder is describing a business and @halyard was describing a lottery ticket. The difference is who bears the cost of the deal not closing.

If I were rebuilding this, the offer would be a monthly retainer for owner outreach in a defined territory, deliverables being contacted owners and completed condition summaries, with a smaller close bonus on top. You'd earn less on the one good deal and you'd have never been down $11,400 waiting to find out.

The fee math is exactly why nobody works my end of the market. A 28 pad park in a town of 4,000 trades for $620k. Two hundred a pad is $5,600 and no aggregator wants the park anyway because it can't carry a manager or a payroll allocation. So the small parks get bought by locals and the funds fight each other over the 100 plus pad stuff with public water, which is where you got run over.

Doesn't make you wrong to have tried. Just means the six state spread put you in the crowded half.

Eight months of your own labor isn't in your $11,400 and it should be. At even $30 an hour on 15 hours a week you're another $14k or so in, so the real number is closer to $25k and one deal that broke even on hard costs. I run a small team and the fastest way to fool yourself is treating your own hours as free.

So the total cost of finding out was around $11,400 cash plus the time @cobalt priced, and the recoverable part is a warm list of 71 owners and a much better fee agreement. That's not a terrible trade for a first attempt at anything, and it's cheaper than most people's first deal.

The line I'm keeping is @sextant's, that you had to prove you were first and that's unprovable. Building the registration step so the other side carries the burden seems like the whole game.