The best buyers on most dispo lists are not buying from the list anymore

The 1.5 percent line is what got me. In Phoenix my last contract moved at 2.8 percent dispo and still closed in eleven days, but it went to one buyer my partner had texted before the blast even drafted. The email went out anyway and nobody else moved on it.

What I can't figure out is whether that relationship was worth paying 2.8 for or whether I basically paid a premium for a phone call that should have been free given the volume I'm bringing.

How many deals do you have to run through someone before that pre-blast call becomes the default instead of the favor?

Every fast close I have watched happen came from a call, not a list.

The list is a backstop now, not a channel.

Take a deal at 180k ARV, bought at 90k, asking 110k wholesale. If the dispo partner has two or three direct relationships who buy that profile, the deal moves in 48 hours and the fee is earned on speed and certainty. If it goes to 2,000 emails first, the same deal might still close at 110k, but the buyer pool you reached is self-selected for "nobody called me directly," which tells you something about their position size and decision speed. The fee looks identical on the HUD but the service delivered is not.

The more interesting pressure is on assignment fees themselves. When a deal closes fast through a direct call, the wholesaler has more room to argue for a higher spread because the buyer got something the list cannot give them, which is first look with no competitive context. The blast buyer knows they are one of 2,000 and prices accordingly. That discount is invisible in the dispo fee conversation but it lives in the spread.

What I have not seen addressed above is what happens to the list's credibility over time if the strong deals never reach it. The buyers who stay active on blast lists start calibrating their offers to a deal quality distribution that skews toward whatever could not move privately, and that recalibration is self-reinforcing. Are the people on your list getting enough volume of actually competitive deals to stay sharp, or are they already adjusting their basis assumptions down?

The misconception worth correcting: the blast did not cause the top buyers to leave, it just stopped reaching them as they moved acquisition criteria tighter and delegated inbox monitoring downward.

What that means for dispo pricing is that the 1.5 percent has two separate components that nobody itemizes. One is the relationship call that happens before distribution, which is where actual execution risk gets absorbed. The other is the broadcast itself, which now functions more as liability coverage for the wholesaler than as a sourcing mechanism. When those two things carry the same fee line, the seller cannot tell what they are actually paying for, and the dispo partner has no incentive to separate them.

The faster close you are describing from a pre-email call also tends to carry a tighter spread because the buyer on the other end of that call already underwrote the asset category, not just the deal. They are not repricing for uncertainty. That difference in buyer sophistication shows up in the as-is offer more than in the timeline, and a dispo shop that can demonstrate its pre-distribution call closed at a tighter discount to ARV than its list-sourced closes has a real argument for a higher fee, or at least for splitting the fee structure to reflect both functions.

What does the deal flow on your end actually look like in terms of how assignment fees compare between those two paths, because that spread is the number I would want to see before deciding whether the list has any strategic value left or is purely defensive?

The checklist a careful operator runs before deciding how to price or even offer a dispo arrangement: confirm whether the service provider has direct relationships with buyers who close in the asset class and price band you are actually selling, not buyers who closed deals two years ago in a different market segment. Ask for a specific call log or text thread showing pre-blast conversations on the last three deals, because that evidence exists if the relationships are real. Pull the actual days-to-contract on their last ten closings and sort by whether the buyer came from the list or from a prior call, since that single column tells you what the fee is really buying. Then price the fee against the documented close speed, because a deal that contracts in four days at 95 cents on the ARV through a relationship is worth more than one that sits seventeen days and closes at 88 through the blast, and the fee structure almost never reflects that distinction.

The question nobody seems to be pricing explicitly is the option value the seller gives up by going to blast first. Once 2,000 inboxes have seen a deal, the relationship buyers who did not get the first call often interpret that as a soft pass from the inner network, and they discount accordingly. Is the dispo partner structuring the fee any differently for pre-marketed relationships versus full-list distribution, or is the 1.5 percent flat regardless of how the buyer was sourced?