Built so your first referral feels as safe as your hundredth.
Agent Lead Exchange is a custodial marketplace for licensed real-estate professionals. Every claim is logged, every closing gets a precise disbursement packet, and the commission split is enforced by signed terms and auditable records — not agent goodwill.
When a deal closes, Agent Lead Exchange generates a disbursement packet naming every payee and exact share. The broker or title company pays each party directly. Agent funds never pass through a platform-owned wallet.
Who pays each party
The receiving broker or title company controls settlement and pays the receiving agent, referring side, and platform directly from the authoritative closing statement. There is no pooled platform balance and no agent payout account to connect.
When the split is delivered
Before settlement, the platform produces the signed agreement, verified closing figures, payee details, and exact dollar amounts. The closing party uses that packet to make direct checks or ACH payments and returns proof for the audit trail.
The single split, on the record
- Receiving agent keeps 80% of GCI on every closed deal.
- Referring agent earns 20%. When no referring agent is attached, that 20% rolls back to the receiving agent (100% take-home).
- Platform takes 0% of commission. Platform access is funded by subscription — same tri-party agreement and direct-disbursement packet on every deal.
A worked example with real numbers:
- 80% · You keep (receiving agent)$8,000.00
- 20% · Referring agent$2,000.00
- 0% · Agent Lead Exchange platform$0.00
Corrections and disputes
If closing figures change, a corrected packet supersedes the prior version and keeps both agents and the settlement party on the same record. Disputes preserve the signed agreement, calculations, proof, and event history for review.
See How payouts work for closing timing, packet delivery, and dispute handling.
Every referral on Agent Lead Exchange is governed by a written, three-party agreement — referring agent, receiving agent, and the platform as neutral custodian. It's the paperwork behind the payout, and it's finalized before client details ever cross the table.
Who signs, and why three parties
A traditional bilateral referral form is only as strong as the two agents' memories of it — nobody neutral is holding a copy. The tri-party structure adds Agent Lead Exchange as an independent custodian of the signed terms, so neither side gets to quietly rewrite the deal later. The platform is not a brokerage, does not represent either agent's client, and is named in the agreement solely to hold and enforce what was signed.
When it's signed
The agreement is executed before the receiving agent sees any client contact info. That timing is what makes the contact-info protections downstream on this page possible — no signature, no client contact information.
What's locked in when both agents sign
- Referral direction and referral type (buyer, seller, or lease)
- Referral fee as a percentage of the receiving agent's gross commission
- Term length, selected by the referring agent at send time (12–36 months)
- A 180-day tail period after the term ends, so late-closing deals still honor the fee
- Receiving-agent obligations: timely status updates and an honest closing disclosure
- The payment split that fires automatically at closing
How the terms are enforced, not just written down
- A versioned snapshot of the exact agreement text is stored with each referral — future edits to the template don't retroactively change an already-signed deal.
- Broker acknowledgment is captured alongside the agent signature so the receiving brokerage is on the record too.
- The economic fields — direction, type, fee percentage, term, tail — are locked at the database layer after signing. Edits are rejected by triggers, not by policy prose.
- Every status change is timestamped and appended to an immutable audit trail that both parties can pull on demand.
Closing-side enforcement — catching a deal that quietly closes without a remittance — is handled by ReferralProof™, and the payment split itself is documented through direct disbursement at closing.
If someone tries to modify or walk away
Locked fields can't be unilaterally rewritten after signing. Declining, expiring, or canceling a referral produces a versioned record rather than a deletion, and the 180-day tail survives cancellation — so a deal that closes a few months later still routes the referral fee correctly.
What the tri-party agreement is not
- Not a listing agreement or buyer-broker agreement with the client
- Not a substitute for your brokerage's own referral or MLS paperwork
- Not a co-brokerage arrangement — neither party joins the other's brokerage
It sits on top of whatever paperwork the two brokerages already use with their clients, and governs only the referral fee between them.
ReferralProof™ is our closing-verification system. It runs continuously in the background so that when a lead claimed on this platform closes in the real world, the referral fee doesn't quietly get skipped. It exists because the industry's biggest referral-fee failure mode isn't dishonest agents — it's forgotten paperwork.
What it watches
Public closing and deed-of-record data, plus comparable public sources that indicate a transaction has completed. It does not read anyone's CRM, MLS credentials, or private brokerage systems, and it never touches client contact info from your side of the deal.
How a match becomes a case
- The engine scans new closings against the history of leads claimed on the platform.
- Multiple independent signals are correlated and scored. Nothing surfaces until the correlation crosses a confidence threshold — honest mismatches are filtered out before anyone is notified.
- When a likely match crosses the threshold, a commission cure case opens automatically and enters the quiet 48-hour pre-cure window described in the Payment Integrity policy.
The specific signals, weights, and thresholds are intentionally not published — a public rulebook would be a cheat sheet for anyone trying to route around it.
What lands in the audit packet
- The signed tri-party referral agreement and broker acknowledgment
- The full claim, milestone, and status-update timeline
- Timestamps for every message exchanged inside the platform
- The ReferralProof™ match reference and confidence tier
- The remittance breakdown (80% receiving / 20% referring)
Either party can generate the packet on demand — it's built for broker compliance reviews, MLS complaints, and state real-estate board filings.
What ReferralProof™ does not do
- Decide who is right when parties disagree
- Act as a collections agency or chase funds on anyone's behalf
- Share client contact info with the referring side of the deal
- Publish its match heuristics or thresholds
A referring agent's biggest fear is that a client's contact information leaks the moment a lead is shopped around. On Agent Lead Exchange, client contact info (name, email, phone, address) is treated as regulated data, not marketing copy — it is gated by the signed agreement and enforced at the database layer, not just hidden in the UI.
What counts as client contact info here
- Full client name
- Phone number and email address
- Exact street address, unit, and geo-coordinates
- Uploaded transaction documents and disclosures
- Private notes attached to the lead
Before the receiving agent signs
- No name, no phone, no email, no exact address.
- Map pins on unclaimed and public-pool leads are city-level and jittered — not the client's home.
- Price band, referral type, timeline, and general area are visible so agents can decide whether to claim; that's it.
After the receiving agent signs
Full client contact info unlocks for the receiving agent only. The referring agent continues to see their own client detail (they always had it) and sees status updates from the receiving side — not a mirror of the receiving agent's private notes or private client communications.
Where the enforcement lives
- Access rules run inside the database on every table — the database itself refuses to hand contact info to a request that doesn't own it, not just the UI hiding a field.
- Server-side redaction on shared surfaces (pools, teasers, map endpoints) so an API response never contains fields the caller shouldn't see.
- Uploaded documents live in access-controlled storage and are served through signed, short-lived URLs.
- No client contact info is sold, syndicated, or shared with any third party — ever. It exists to close the deal it was submitted for.
Security controls in force today, grouped by what they protect. This section describes enabled capabilities, not certifications.
Identity
- Email + password with rate-limited sign-in and lockout on abuse
- Optional TOTP two-factor authentication
- Step-up re-authentication for sensitive actions (payout changes, 2FA disable, account deletion)
- Session revocation on password or email change
Data
- Database-enforced access rules on every table — each account only sees rows it owns
- Encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest for the database and object storage
- Encrypted storage for signed agreements and uploaded documents, served via signed URLs
- Automated database backups with point-in-time recovery
Integrations
- Signed, per-org webhook URLs for inbound leads (Facebook Lead Ads, Zapier)
- Signature verification on all outbound webhooks and platform billing callbacks
- Per-account API scoping and rate limits
- MCP tools only see what the signed-in user is allowed to see — no back-door admin access
Operational
- Immutable audit log for referral state changes and payment events
- Admin actions are logged with actor, timestamp, and target
- Least-privilege server functions; service-role usage is limited to verified webhooks and maintenance jobs
What we don't claim
Agent Lead Exchange is not currently SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, or PCI-certified. Platform billing card data is handled by our PCI-compliant payment processor; the platform never sees a raw card number.
Agent Lead Exchange is an independent marketplace operator. What it is — and, just as importantly, what it isn't — is documented here so nothing about the business model is ambiguous.
The platform's role
Custodian of the tri-party agreement and the payment split. The platform takes 0% of commission on any deal — its revenue comes from a platform-access subscription, not from a slice of the referral fee. Leads that the platform sources are routed to a member agent under the same 80 / 20 split (0% platform), same tri-party agreement, same ReferralProof™ audit trail, and same direct closing disbursement as any other referral.
What the platform is not
- Not a real-estate brokerage. It does not hold a broker license and does not supervise agents.
- Not a client-facing agent. It does not represent buyers, sellers, or tenants.
- Not an in-house agent team. There is no house roster competing with members for platform-sourced leads.
- Not a lead reseller. Client contact info is not sold, syndicated, or shared with third parties.
- Not selling agent contact data. Member profiles are used to run the marketplace, not monetize a mailing list.
How the platform makes money
Platform-access subscription. The platform takes 0% of commission — every dollar of the 20% referral fee stays with the referring agent on the deal. If a deal doesn't close, no commission changes hands.