The reason for this is if you only pay per deal, they will be unsure if they ever will get paid because their payday depends on your performance.

As for investor performance one needs to look at 24 to 36 months and see how they are doing for that period of time first year is honey moon period its after that were the rubber meets the road..

I am most interested in REO's and non performing notes.  

@Sean Tagge  100% gurantee that your UTAH properties will out perform ANY 20 to 40K  major mid west market properties. you simply will get killed in turn over trashed units and uncollected rent.. these are ghetto war zone dogs..

Do you have a good track record of performance?

Looking back, we should have walked away from our poorest performing properties instead of trying to save them. 

Don't over complicate.Take purchase price, say $150,000$1,000 Down payment$9,000 Purchase Money Note (secured by Trust Deed or Mortgage) payable X for Y years$140,000 - Subject to existing 1st mortgage (approx balance, terms per lender's Note)You could offer another few lines concerning progressive release of funds on certain events like possession, etc.Also, you could offset seller's/attorney's concern about your payment of sub-2 loan by you giving performance trust deed that you will pay 1st or AITD Wrap of 1st and purchase money note to given them more control.

Almost to where he/she doesn't perform to the original agreement?

This is a great tip; as a newbie to google's cloud based suite of tools it opened my eyes to some possibilities I hadn't realized before.Something I discovered is that you can add additional columns to the spreadsheet to perform calculations on the values submitted from the form.

I realize that including the commission may be counter-intuitive financially since I'll now have to pay income tax on that amount, but it does allow me to get some instant cash that I can use to hold in reserves, perform repairs, or start paying down the HELOC I used for the down payment.