I met an investor and she wants me to find her distressed house deals. She met up with me and we talked a while. She never mentioned how much would I be paid for bringing her a deal. I called her a few times about potential leads. There was always this looming question for me: what would she pay me for bringing in a deal?
I asked today and got a vague response about how it depends on the size of the deal and it generally just pays for my advertising costs. That sounds like an unbalanced exchange. It sounds like I would work to bring her a house that is a great investment, she gets the deal and I probably just break even?
How can I finagle my way to get paid better for bird dogging?
If she can’t give you a straight, fast answer, she hasn’t been doing this very long. Just saying.
If you’re just forwarding addresses, and the investor is doing all the leg work, you should expect $500 on a closed deal.
If you’re mailing, qualifying responses, setting appointments, profiling the property and the seller, and performing comps, and the investor is negotiating the closings and finding the buyers, than 50% of your investor’s fees is justifiable.
However, half the proceeds can vary dramatically from deal to deal. You’re gonna put in a lot of work (potentially) on a given deal and not get paid anything, when it doesn’t close.
Meantime, everything’s negotiable, and depending on what the investor discovers about your deal, the compensation quote can change on a dime.
You need to be finding deals for more than one investor. Just don’t feed different investors the same deals, or you might end up the victim of a 3-shot suicide.
I just fired my favorite bird dog, she was sharing the same addresses with another wholesaler. I paid her $2,000 just 6 weeks ago on a deal that paid $6,000. I feel betrayed. She wont even tell me who the guy is, just that his name is Michael M.
How it came about is, She asked me if I wanted some addresses in a town 45 minutes away, I told her yea, I luv that area. Then I asked how did you come across these addresses. She tells me she is also working for another investor and that’s the area he wants.
Maybe I acted a bit rash, but hell, she sent me the same frikin addresses she sent him, I can only assume she’s sharing the other addresses that shes been sending to me.
I used to pay my bird dogs 50% of the deals, I felt finding the deals was half the battle. Then I discovered they are quite happy to get $2,000 Now I’m wondering if they will be happy with $1,000
I can also see a need for a confidentially agreement. Sharing addresses will drive up the prices when wer bidding against each other & making profitable deals less likely.
Where is the Loyalty? Where is the love?
Wholesalers want to leverage their time by recruiting as many bird-dogs as they can, to generate leads.
If a bird-dog knows how to find and qualify leads, negotiate closings profitably, and finds his own buyers, he would be acting as a wholesaler. Then it comes back to recruiting his own set of bird-dogs.
BTW, just to clarify terms here. Bird-dogs find rehab-candidate deals for wholesalers. Wholesalers flip those deals to rehabbers. Rehabbers rehab those deals, and retail them to end/user buyers.
So, the definition of a bird-dog is that he simply hunts and finds leads, and brings them to the wholesaler.
Randoskie, it sounds like your bird dog just did not know any better. None of the investors who want me bird dogging for them ever mentioned that I should not share the leads with other investors. None of them discuss any terms at all with me, they just say bring me a deal, they do not even say I will be reimbursed, which does suggest they have not had skin in the game as long as yourself and Jay here who would likely not be shy about putting some terms on the table for a bird dog. Sure if your bird dogs share leads with other investors and keep you in the dark about it, it does dillute your odds of success, but that is not a totally obvious rule for bird doggers. After all, like Jay points out from the heirarchy of positions from being a wholesaler to flipper, a bird dog should not be expected to know any better. You probably need to straight up spend extra time telling them the real score.
Haha, she said she was sorry and only shared with me the list of out of town addresses she found for the other Wholesaler.
I told her OK get back out there and find more and don’t share addresses.
I will amend my bird dog agreement to have a confidentiality statement that they have to sign in Blood.
This girl has sent me a ton of addresses, hate to lose that stream of prospects.
If fact she just sent me an address, sits on the outskirts of town, on 7 acres, newer home with huge shop, property was inherited by 2 brothers that look like they have been to drug hell and stayed there. They told my bird dog that they sold the Antique cars, farm equipment and furnishings & coin collection, RV, boats, and already spent the large cash left to them. The parents havnt been dead that long.
Now their living in the house with no electricity, they got no phones, they look like they havnt had a bath and shave since 2002.
I gotta tell you, I’m drooling all over myself and getting ready to go talk to them. I wonder if they will take just enuf money to purchase a few Kilos of Meth and walk?
Bird dog said they have trashed the place. It’s really sad to see this city with this huge tweaker problem. I seen a special on TV and they said… Stay tuned, Meth Capitol of the world, I was thinking this will be interesting, and it turned out to be my city.
Interesting. Let us know the results with the two guys in the house. My first thoughts when talking to them is bring a few hundred dollars cash when talking to them and take the cash out and just sort of flash it like you are just adjusting the bills and put them back in your pocket. The mear site of a genuine $100 bill would get their wheels spinning out of control, like an impulse buyer at the checkout of a candy store.
My bird dog didn’t exaggerate. These 2 brothers looked like hell, missing teeth, tattoos, shaved heads, dirty clothes. I told him I cud do 175K Cash and he says he got offered $300,000 I told him wow you shud take that. These 2 guys were living in an old motor home and a small travel trailer. The house was nice, almost empty, no curtains, and a broken sofa. They didn’t have electricity to run the water pump and I was wondering why they didn’t live in the house instead of the motor home and travel trailr. Old broken down vehicles and motor cycles littered the yards.
Then he tells me he already signed with a realtor and this realtor promised he cud get 300K I tell him they always over promise and under deliver. If you can wait 3-6 months and willing to pay out huge realtor fees and multiple price drops and take a chance it wont sell. Then he tells me what I already knew. We want to sell fast. I told him to cancel the Realtor contract and I cud have his money in less than 30 days.
He said he wud, I may go back out there with $500 cash as an earnest deposit and see if he will cancel that contract.
They may prefer the mobile homes because utilities are better arranged. The house must be shut down. They could have used the house as a clandestine laboratory and that contaminates everything. Remember cleaning up a meth lab house is extremely expensive to do properly… I would carefully ask the brothers some questions to figure out if they were using the house as a lab. I would not out right ask them that but be creative about getting answers from them.
Are Realtor contracts easy to cancel like that ??? I would think not.
You can also inform the brothers more about real estate sales. Let them know you plan to fix and flip the property and you want distressed properties. Let them know Realtors are fiddling around with tire kickers and people with no experience fixing up properties. Kind of educate them about the difference between you as an investor compared to Realtors. The basics are that you offer less money but you also offer a much much faster sale. Also there will be no paranoia. No strangers viewing their house with a Realtor. No strangers on their property looking around… No cops.
And flash a little wad of cash???
Give them a handful of your cards. Make them your bird dogs. They must know tons of tweakers with houses to sell in a big hurry. Network with them.
Haha, All-Ears, tweakers wont be working for me or anybody, their brains are fried, they don’t work, they are too tweaked out to run a lab. If you want to see them in action go to youtube and type in tweakers, not sure if its hilarious or sad or both. Their job is to roam neighborhoods at night looking for things to steal. You cant trust them, they are paranoid. Sometimes violent.
Good points Randoskie. Out of all the types of distressed home sellers we persue (dead, divorced, sick, poor) the meth crowd are potentially the saddest. They are probably the most dangerous and volatile too. Like zombies.