The short answer
A revenue-share or pay-per-funded-deal arrangement transfers the vendor’s entire risk onto your sales process, which they cannot see or control — so vendors who offer it either price it far above what leads cost outright, or are not generating leads and have nothing to lose. It also gives them a claim on your funded deals, which is a commercial relationship most brokers have not thought through.
It is an attractive-sounding offer: pay nothing up front, pay a share of what funds. The reason serious vendors decline to do it is worth understanding before you accept it from one who will.
The vendor cannot control the variable
Whether a lead funds depends overwhelmingly on how fast it is called, how many times, and how well the file is packaged — none of which the vendor sees or influences. Asking them to be paid on your funded rate is asking them to underwrite your sales floor, and they will price that uncertainty into the share.
| Structure | Who carries the risk | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Pay per lead | You | Known, up front |
| Pay per funded deal | The vendor | Far more per deal, to cover the unknown |
| Revenue share | The vendor | A permanent claim on your commissions |
What it means when one offers
- They may not be generating leads at all, and have no cost to recover if nothing funds.
- They may be reselling aggregated data where the marginal cost is near zero.
- They may want the funded-deal data, which is worth more than the leads.
- Occasionally it is a genuine partnership offer — and those come with the vendor asking about your process, because it is now their problem.
What it costs in practice
Run the arithmetic against your own numbers. At the bottom of the client-reported benchmark for exclusive leads, two funded per fifty, one deal takes 25 leads, and at $60 a lead that is about $1,500 per funded deal. A revenue share costs more than that once it passes about a quarter of a $6,200 commission ($1,500 ÷ $6,200 = 24%) — and it continues on every deal rather than stopping at the invoice.