Pricing an acquisition sourcing fee for owners already in management

Say a management shop runs 140 doors across roughly 60 owners, and a chunk of those owners have asked some version of find me another one. Handing that to an outside brokerage for nothing, and occasionally watching the owner buy something that would never have been taken into management, is the pressure that pushes a shop toward pricing its own sourcing line. Two shapes tend to come up. One is 1.5% of purchase price at close plus the property entering management at a standard fee. On a $240k house that is $3,600. The cost to produce one contracted deal, with one acquisitions hire around $58k plus data and mail spend, can land near $5,200 per closed deal at six closings a year and drop under $3,000 at fourteen, so the whole model lives or dies on volume that has to be built first. Two is a flat fee per closed acquisition with a modest monthly engagement fee while actively searching, credited against the flat fee at close. That smooths labor cost and filters out owners who only want to browse. The open questions worth flagging for anyone building this line. Whether the activity is licensed depends on the state, since the line for acting on a buyer's behalf for compensation is drawn differently place to place, and that is a question for counsel before anything is printed. A management agreement's conflict clause on affiliated services may not sit comfortably under a new sourcing fee either. And owners can read a percentage fee as a second commission on top of one they already believe they're paying. The percentage structure scales with price, which runs backwards, since a $180k house often takes more work than a $320k one. That is the argument for a flat fee, and the counterargument is that a flat fee can look small next to what a buyer's agent earns on the same transaction, which shapes how owners will hear it.