Adding acquisition sourcing for owners we manage. The fee shape won't come right.

We manage 140 doors across roughly 60 owners. Eleven of them have asked in the last year some version of "find me another one." Right now I hand that to a brokerage we like and get nothing, and twice the owner bought something I would not have taken into management.

So I'm pricing a sourcing line. Two shapes on my desk.

One, 1.5% of purchase price, paid at close, plus the property enters management at our standard 8%. On a $240k house that's $3,600. My cost to produce one contracted deal, if I hire one acquisitions person at $58k plus data and mail at about $1,900 a month, works out to somewhere near $5,200 per closed deal at a 6 closings per year pace, and drops under $3,000 if I can get to 14. So the whole thing lives or dies on volume I don't have yet.

Two, flat $4,000 per closed acquisition with a $750 monthly engagement fee while we're actively looking, credited against the flat fee. That smooths the labor cost and filters out the owners who want to browse.

The unresolved parts. Whether any of this is a licensed activity for us depends on the state we operate in, and the licensing line for acting on a buyer's behalf for compensation is drawn differently state to state, so that's a question for counsel here before I print anything. Separately, our management agreement already has a conflict clause about affiliated services and I'm not sure a sourcing fee sits comfortably under it. And I genuinely don't know whether owners will read the percentage as reasonable or as a second commission on top of the one they think they're already paying.

The percentage version scales with price, which is backwards, because the $180k houses take more work than the $320k ones. That's the thing pushing me toward the flat fee, and the thing stopping me is that the flat fee looks small next to what a buyer's agent makes on the same transaction and I'm not sure how owners will hear it.