Is dispo-only a business someone owns, or a function performed for people who can fire them?

A dispo-only operator doesn't find the property, doesn't contract the seller, doesn't take title, and doesn't put up money. They hold a list of cash buyers and get paid a share of somebody else's fee for making a match. Disposition is a real specialty, and the buyer network is the genuine asset, since wholesalers who can find deals but can't sell them are common in this business. The harder question is whether that network constitutes a business someone owns or a function they perform for people who can walk away from them. A buyer list stays valuable only as long as the two best buyers on it don't start taking calls directly from the wholesalers who sourced the deals, and both sides of that relationship have an obvious incentive to cut out the middle once they've met each other directly. A marketplace platform is structurally different, since the aggregation itself is the asset. A single operator with a spreadsheet and a phone, by contrast, may functionally be a well paid contractor rather than a business owner, however the arrangement is labeled. What tends to sustain buyer loyalty over years in this model is consistent deal flow and reliability on both sides of the match, not just the size of the list at any one point in time.