$73,000 on one deal. Our caller opened the door.

The setup

Simon came to us in August — 3 years in the game, averaging 6 deals a year, assignment fees in the $8K–$12K range. Nothing crazy. He said on the discovery call: "I don’t need 50 deals. I need 2 or 3 big ones a year that actually move the needle."

We told him the truth: chasing big deals on purpose is a bad strategy. You chase volume of motivated sellers, and the big ones fall out when they fall out. He agreed to run the playbook.

The call

On March 3, 2026, Derek (our senior caller on the Florida team) dialed a vacant property record in Orange County — a house in Winter Park, FL, that had been sitting empty for over a year with an out-of-state owner.

The owner was a retired engineer living in Phoenix. He’d inherited the property years ago but never did anything with it. He’d been getting mailers and calls for months from "vultures" (his word) and was ready to just list it. Derek spent 47 minutes on that first call — no pitching, mostly listening.

What Derek caught: the property was on a lot zoned for a rebuild-for-three configuration. The existing house had ARV around $520K. But a tear-down with three new 2,200 sqft builds? That was an entirely different math problem, and the owner had no idea.

Derek fired a hot-lead alert to Simon’s phone at 2:17 PM Central. Simon was on a walkthrough for a $9K deal when it pinged. He finished the walkthrough, called the owner back within 45 minutes, and had a contract signed by end-of-week.

The assignment

Simon locked it up at $340,000 — well under comparable acquisition costs in that zip. He shopped it to a builder in his network who had been hunting vacant lots in Winter Park for 8 months.

Builder paid $413,000. Simon walked with a $73,000 assignment fee — his largest ever, nearly 6x his average — for 11 days of work.

"Seven months of retainer paid for itself in one phone call. I didn’t find the lead. I didn’t work the lead. My guys found it, qualified it, and handed it to me warm. I just closed it."

The takeaway

Simon doesn’t do 50 deals a year. He does 8 or 10 — but now with one deal in the mix that covers a year of overhead. That’s the math that actually works for most operators we talk to.

You don’t need to be dialing every day. You need a senior caller dialing every day. Ask Simon.