Unlocking Real Estate Success: 5 Key Dispo Strategies

Mike Hambright (00:01.166)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with my buddy, Daniel McClam and we’re gonna be talking about dominating Dispo. Like what’s gotten challenging over the past few years really is Dispo because a lot of people that just relied on selling to the same few people, a of those folks went away or they couldn’t get lending. And so we’re in this era now of Dispo being more important than it’s ever been. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. How to dominate Dispo going forward. Daniel, what’s up buddy?

Daniel McClam (00:27.399)
Hey, what’s up, mate? Thanks for having me,

Mike Hambright (00:29.166)
Yeah, can’t help but notice you use the, uh, Christmas gift of the, uh, canvas as a blind on your window right behind you there from investor fuel. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, when you’re a startup, you’re, you’re, uh, sleeping on cardboard boxes and all sorts of stuff. Right.

Daniel McClam (00:40.603)
Yeah, know, when I get some time to hang some blinds in here, we’ll do that and we’ll swap it out.

Yeah, I’m not going to show you the rest of the office in here. yeah, it’s a good placeholder and I felt it was applicable for the call today.

Mike Hambright (00:58.978)
Yeah, yeah. you guys have really kind of caught, let’s say, catch lightning in a bottle here lately with Investorbase. And it’s really the fact that a lot of people who were actively buying in the past, especially institutional buyers and stuff like that, have kind of gone by the wayside or they’re on hold or they’re gone or whatever. And so a lot of folks that were selling to a list that they had or maybe gotten complacent because they were selling to the same people over and over again.

Their cheese kind of got moved here over the past year or two and you guys are helping with that. So I know Dispo’s more important than ever right now. And so before we jump into that, actually, why don’t you just tell us your background because I know you didn’t, you’re like a lot of entrepreneurs, you as a real estate investor had to solve your own problem. And then you realized that your solution, other people could benefit from that as well. maybe tell us your kind of brief story.

Daniel McClam (01:51.857)
Yeah, 100%. I I majored in commercial real estate and then I was a commercial real estate broker for three years. Loved it. Decided to get into wholesaling when my older brother Andrew got into it and started to form some relationships with some of these institutional buyers. So long story short, jumped in over the course of two years. You know, we probably sold

I don’t know, 150 deals or something like that to only institutional buyers, right? So this was 2021, 2022. was a lot of fun back then, right? Dispo was pretty fun, pretty easy. All good things must come to an end. So 2022, it got a little bit challenging, right? We had scaled really quickly, our wholesale business did. We had four acquisition managers in-house. had…

20 cold callers overseas, doing 40 leads a day. We had an office downtown Charleston. We were rocking and rolling. We were geared up, right? Like October of 2022, rates went up. And a lot of these people we were sourcing deals to across 10 different markets, we were working with probably 10 different hedge funds and essentially like,

Almost all of them just kind of turned the money off at that point in time. And it created a really difficult time in my wholesale business because we’d never sold a deal to a local flipper landlord before. So essentially what we had to do is recreate how we found qualified buyers, right? Not only that, but who was going to pay the most because that’s how we build our businesses. We’re going to chase the hedge fund.

who’s paying 110 % of ARV, right? And that’s where we dump our marketing in. So we still have the same methodology and that blossomed into investor base and what it is today. We created a manual process of identifying flippers and landlords and just sped the process up, automated it into what you see today. And to your point.

Daniel McClam (04:17.079)
we realized that a lot of other people, had the same issues as us due to the times, right? Disco got really tight and, we started to offer the product to other people and did a hard launch in, April. And now I’m on your podcast.

Mike Hambright (04:34.798)
You know what’s funny is, we had a guy recently at Investor Fuel that was, we were talking about improving his profitability and he said something that I know a lot of real estate investors do is he has…

you know, a handful of people that he sells most of his deals to and keeps going back to the same people. And I’ve been guilty of that in the past, you know, where somebody, and then what happens is like your kind of quote best customers start to say like, hey man, I’m a good customer. Like, can you knock five grand off? And you’re like, how about like a beer, you know? So, but.

Daniel McClam (05:08.849)
you

Mike Hambright (05:10.83)
And he even said, this guy, you know who he is because he’s using your product now, said, and they’re my friends and my buddies and stuff, so he’s like, I want them to make money too. So not that we don’t want anybody we sell to to make money, we don’t want anybody to lose, but at end of the day, you have to kind of maximize your profitability, otherwise you’re leaving money.

on the table. think that’s one of things that you guys are doing really well is you’re helping investors identify the people that are not on their list they don’t even know about. And in my experience, and I know you agree with this, a lot of the people that are willing to pay the most outside of institutional buyers because they had stupid money that they didn’t care about making money or whatever, who knows, is, you know, mom and pops, they might be doing their own, the work themselves.

And contractors, I mean it could be anybody that just doesn’t evaluate the deal the same way as us. the expense for the rehab may be way less because they’re actually doing the work or they’ve got some family members that are to do the work or whatever. And that’s essentially what your product does is it helps kind of marry together you and your deal with buyers in your market that you might not even know about that are willing to pay the most,

Daniel McClam (06:17.895)
Yeah, for sure. And I still full heartedly believe in relational based selling. mean, that’s the way it was originally before you had the ability or before everyone just started blasting essentially and expecting offers to come to their doorstep. Now, having a handful of buyers is great. They can be your buddies. But we make it pretty easy for you at InvestorBase to have

a lot more than just a handful of good buddy buyers. We literally make it as easy as possible for you to just bring that person into your world for future contact. There’s nothing wrong with having some relational-based selling with a handful of people, but you’re going to be leaving money on the table if you’re not growing that relational-based list, your buyer’s list, essentially.

Mike Hambright (07:11.31)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What are some other ways that the market has changed? We just talked about a few of them here, but how has kind of Dispo changed from, I guess, years past?

Daniel McClam (07:25.991)
I don’t want this to be a full market analysis, but I’ll touch on it quick, then I’ll get to essentially the marketing channels specifically. But yeah, mean, you got to look at the end of the transaction, which is really retail buyers. know, rates are at an all time high within the last four years. So the market is still really tight, right? You know,

Time on market has exponentially increased year over year and it’s higher now than ever. So it is a little bit more challenging to sell houses on the market. So I’m referring to flippers, right? And when flippers get squeezed, wholesalers get squeezed, right? So it’s a natural effect of just due to where the market is that buyers need deeper discounts. So it’s gonna, that section just with the market, it’s not controllable by us.

but we can’t act on it. But that’s definitely one layer of why Dispo is getting harder. In my opinion, the second layer of that is just the marketing channels that are available to wholesalers on the disposition front. And this has changed a lot since 2021, 2022 to now. So when you have a timeline on a contract, say it’s your inspection period or say it’s just a closing timeline,

You are restricted to less marketing channels than what you can do with sellers. So you had an investor machine, all can send direct mail to find sellers. You can do PPC, you can do a lot of different things. It’s a lot harder and almost impossible to do that on the Dispo front due to the timeline, the turnaround timeline. So we’re really limited to three main channels, which is email, text, and call.

when it’s a seller’s market, email and text blasts work great, right? You know, it’s an inbound, you push a button and you could write a letter in the wind in 2021, 2022 and you’d have 15 offers on your doorstep, right? That’s just how it was. But the email channel specifically has gotten very noisy. I mean, for any owners of a company or anyone in general listening,

Daniel McClam (09:51.217)
to this podcast, I mean, you can attest to how much your inbox fills up with spam and crap and say bad deals from wholesalers, for instance, that you have no idea who they are. it does, you do grow numb to it. And so that’s a major shift that we’re seeing from then to now is the email channel is getting a little bit trickier. I think tech still works great.

But really call, that’s what we’re leaning into at Investor Base is encouraging people to pick up the phone and make some phone calls because it is and always will be the highest form of conversion is a phone call.

Mike Hambright (10:37.646)
Yeah, yeah, awesome. So I think, you keep saying this word relational selling. I think, I mean, that’s exactly what I’m doing here on the podcast, right? Is I know a ton of people, but why I committed to doing 250 podcasts myself this year hosting is like, I know the power of the relationships of kind of getting together. obviously, you you’re part of Investor Fuel, came out to my ranch to hang out with us and stuff like that. And our relationship has been, you know,

built from that base, is like just kind of hanging out, becoming friends, getting to know each other and stuff. And so I think that it’s kind of like back to basics type stuff, right? mean, everybody wants to hit a button and send like 6 billion texts and like hit everybody, but not only are the carriers and the kind of the, guess really the carriers and, or ESP or internet service providers that are blocking your emails and stuff because they know it’s just spam.

Be different, like be the guy or the gal that is taking the time to kind of get to know people that will become your best customer, will become your best customers in just a matter of time,

Daniel McClam (11:47.911)
Yeah, only downside is calling takes time. Right? Look, you said, you know, everyone would love to push a button and have it blasted and then receive offers. But it’s just not working as well anymore. So I think people need to kind of wrap their head around the fact that we might need to allocate more time towards, towards Dispo, especially in an outbound call campaign channel.

We help you as much as we possibly can at InvestorBase prioritize the right buyers to call versus just a massive list. And how we do that is we’re smart matching buyers based on their transaction history. So if someone’s done a very similar deal to you nearby recently, they’re doing a lot of deals, they’re paying a high price, a lot of other factors go into it.

we’re going to populate them towards the top for you to prioritize calling them. So we understand it takes time, but once again, we’re eliminating a lot of the, we’re eliminating all the guesswork for you and the steps, right? To create an effective call campaign. You can’t have, you know, you got to trade off a little bit, right? Like, mean, I, InvestorBase wouldn’t be here.

If I could still send a button and get the same results as I could then, know, things change and you got to adapt. And that’s why I’m here now and not, you know, making a lot of money. Wholesaling is because we created this system that other people needed. We saw that need and jumped on the opportunity.

Mike Hambright (13:38.222)
Yeah, talk a little more about kind of how it all started. mean, you saw that your institutional buyers went away and maybe just share a little more about kind of why you’re doing this now. And then I think let’s get into a little bit about just the evolution. Cause I know with Investor Machine, which we run, which is a Lead gen company for professional investors. If I think about like we’ve had

We haven’t always done a great job of letting the whole world know about it, but we’ve had the best product on the market for five years, five and a half years. But where we are now is like a light year ahead of where we were then. there’s every once in a while we have some evolutionary thing that happens. We’re like, holy cow, this is like so much better. But when you focus on it and when you focus on the customer that you’re trying to serve and you know who you’re trying to help.

there’s a lot of value in that. And people could say, well, it’s just sending mail. It’s like, now it’s not at all. It’s really more of a data thing. And then for you guys, it’s the same thing. You could just go into the MLS and look up cash buyers and just start contacting them or whatever. But it’s like, you could, but there’s a better way, right? And I know that’s what you guys are focused on. So maybe just talk a bit more about how you got started and then the evolution that you’ve been through just over the past 10 months or so.

Daniel McClam (14:56.229)
Yeah, well, even take it back a step further, mean, like, it got really challenging for us when the hedge funds exited. I mean, I remember one day we lost $150,000 worth of assignment fees in like two phone calls. We had like 30 deals in our contract and half got, not half, but 30 % got wiped in one day. That’s tough for your acquisition managers when they’re banking on commissions.

So furthermore, we still had 40 leads coming in a day. We still had 30 deals in our contract with the seller. So we had to move them somehow. So we had to JV. And then JV model, which there’s a lot of JV wholesalers out there that aren’t doing lead gen, that just want to help people sell deals or vice versa. It was completely unsustainable for my acquisition managers. They’re still doing the same amount of work, but now they’re making half as much.

So they were like, Daniel, you got to figure out how to sell your own deals. So we figured out how to sell our own deals. It’s essentially what happened. But the tool was so powerful that the reason why we went into it full time is, you know, I had a small group of people that only sold institutional buyers. We had our own little mastermind. It was called Beat the Sunup. There was probably 30 people in there.

and all of us sold institutional buyers, like only. And all of them were struggling, right? And so like I offered the tool to them and they’re like, dude, this is like the greatest thing ever. And, you know, we, I’d like to think we saved some businesses there. And seeing that, you know, I realized that there’s so many other people out there struggling with the same problem. Maybe not specifically with the institutional buyers, but just with Dispo in general. So we offered it to a lot of people that we knew and

They were like, man, you got to rule this out. So we found joy and value and actually helping people’s businesses to start. And we still do. We saw it as an opportunity. yeah, that was the backstory. I can talk on the growth if you want.

Mike Hambright (17:14.69)
Yeah, let’s talk about, you know, kind of just the, guess maybe your journey of kind of evolution of continually improving it. it’s, sometimes you can’t see, like when you’re in it as deep as you guys are, you can’t see like where you’re going to end up. You’re just trying to go from A to B versus A to Z. And it’s amazing to kind of the transformation and the value of the tools that you create.

Daniel McClam (17:33.937)
Wow.

Mike Hambright (17:40.82)
over time because it seems incremental, seems like it’s little things here and there but when you look back it’s like the gap versus the gain type mentality of like there’s just massive transformations to where nobody can keep you and the value you’re adding to the community is bigger than what you ever thought it would be.

Daniel McClam (17:59.227)
Right. Yeah, so to start, we needed to identify verified flip and buy and hold deals. Pulling together the raw property data and a quote unquote cash buyer’s list was just completely inefficient. We had to scrub it. We had to go do a five-step process to produce the people that we actually wanted to talk with. So that was step one, and that was like V1 of InvestorBase.

Second came when we were still calling some of these people, but one might be a luxury flipper and this is a $50,000 house. Like it didn’t make sense for that person. So then we built Smart Match AI to produce the most likely buyers and this cut time in half again. Then we realized, okay, it’s tough to keep track of calling a hundred and 150 buyers. know, like I was a one man show doing Dispo for the whole company. Well, when I was a one man show and when we had a

10 person team, I was still handling all the disk wealth. You think I could keep track of who I called, who I didn’t call, who was interested? I mean, we had a CRM, but it was hard to manage, you know? So that’s when we created the trackability in my deals, is now you can keep track of who you’re calling and you’re not calling, stay on top of your KPIs. Then we realized like there was no way to bring these people into your world and really create some relational based selling. So we launched Buyers List.

So now you can just programmatically add a buyer to your list and edit their buy box. But what we do for you is we go ahead and pull in all the locations that they’re buying in based on the deals that they’ve done. So we’re already pulling in, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 zip codes in cities and counties for you that you don’t have to sit there and ask them for, which is a huge time saver to building your list. So that was over Christmas.

we’re leaning more into analytics too. So we learned this from our users actually is a lot of people gave investor base to their, acquisition managers and was like, Hey, before you make an offer, run it through investor base to see exactly what buyers are paying around you. And we realized that like, a large portion of our user base was using it to, to comp properties based on what buyers are actually paying.

Daniel McClam (20:25.767)
So we created investor comps. So that’s an average for you, average flip price, average landlord price in the area. So it’s a quick look into, hey, what should I tie this up at? But also, what should I sell it at?

Mike Hambright (20:40.034)
Yeah, that’s huge because I mean, honestly, I’ve flipped hundreds of houses and I’ve never looked at, I mean, the only comps I looked at were MLS comps, like not what are investors do, what’s investor activity in this market? I mean, there really wasn’t a tool to do that anyway, but I think the truth is, if you’re, you know,

Most people are generally trying to get their acquisitions people to be a little bit conservative and it doesn’t take much to like miss out on a deal because you think you’re only going to be able to sell it for X. But if you can see proven investor activity of like, there’s people that are buying for this or that. I mean, you could even you could even call those folks like, hey, I’m about to get a deal in this neighborhood. Like, would you be interested? Right. And you can kind of or maybe do that during an option period or during a

inspection period or something like that just to make sure that that you didn’t overpay but you in theory you could pay a little bit more if you needed to and not miss out on a deal because you know who the buyer is going to be on the back end right.

Daniel McClam (21:38.809)
Exactly. Yeah, there’s two sides of that coin. It’ll help you save deals or let’s say create deals based on whether buyers are paying because you can maybe offer more or then you know you need to offer less. But it will also tell you which deals not to do. So like rural leads for instance, everybody gets them. I don’t care what channel you’re in. You’re always going to get leads in the market outside of the place you wanted to get leads in.

And sometimes it looks like a great deal. But if you run it through investor base and see that no one’s done a deal there in the last five years within 10 miles, you probably shouldn’t spend a lot of time on that deal and it will save you the headache on the Dispo front. You can attest to that personally, I’m sure, but in our business, I got so tired of the uphill battle trying to like rural deals.

My assistant manager is like, man, give it a shot. Give it a shot. I’m like, dude, I don’t want to waste my time. Like, can’t. I’m not doing it. You know? I’m not doing it.

Mike Hambright (22:43.288)
Yeah. Yeah. I was just talking about that with somebody else on a recent podcast about acquisitions is easier when you go out.

in more rural areas, but everybody’s biggest challenge becomes dispo. I mean, you just flip your problem, right? And so, and it’s often, you know, there’s not a lot of investor activity out there. So can you find it at all? mean, one of the other great things about your tool is that inevitably every real estate investor generates leads. And for those that are spending a lot on marketing, marketing is expensive and they get a lead in some other market where they’re not at. And they just historically have to say like, we don’t buy there or

Daniel McClam (22:56.475)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (23:19.766)
I might know somebody that does and see if they’ll JV with me, but with your tool, if I’m in Dallas and I generate a lead from somebody that lives in Dallas, but they grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and they’re like, I’m starting to sell my mom’s house up in Des Moines. And historically we’d be like, yeah, sorry, we just buy in the Dallas Fort Worth area. And now it’s like, well, maybe, like, you know, let me, I mean, and the reason that people don’t generally go buy in other markets and far off lands is because the dispo part is hard, right?

Daniel McClam (23:40.444)
Yeah.

Daniel McClam (23:48.711)
Yeah, I mean, 100%. And it still is, right? Like Investorbase will help you, you know, get past some of those hurdles for sure. But it’s still going to be harder. There’s always less flips because, you know, there’s less, there’s less comparable properties for a flipper to feel comfortable doing a flip there. You know, there’s less retail buyers in those smaller markets. But what you will find often is some mom and pop landlords that

own half the town in InvestorBase and it’s pretty clear when you find that you’re like, this is my guy, right? And at that point, 100 % call that person prior to even going on a contract, telling them you got this deal coming down the pipeline, so you’re buying a lot of rentals, are you interested? That’s a major value win right there for sure.

Mike Hambright (24:42.574)
That’s awesome. Yeah, for those of you that are listening or watching right now, Daniel, I mean, their product is great. And we came up with an offer to get you guys a 14 day free trial and then a hundred bucks off of your first month. And I think that a hundred bucks is like 40 % off of your first month or something like that. So it’s a great product and you should go check it out for sure. You can, if you go to investorfuel.com slash investor base, all one word, investorfuel.com slash investor base, can.

get and take advantage of that offer. So thanks for sharing that with our listeners, Daniel. Yeah. Where do you see this about going from here? Like what’s the evolution from here at some point, you know, with the new president in place and you know, it looks like there’s a lot more confidence in the financial markets and it feels like interest rates might start to creep down a little bit, but probably not certainly to where we were. So.

Daniel McClam (25:17.659)
Yeah, for sure.

Mike Hambright (25:39.092)
Nobody has a crystal ball knowing exactly what’s going to happen here, but where do you see kind of Dispo going over the next couple of years?

Daniel McClam (25:46.727)
Yeah, hopefully rates go down a little bit in the next 30 to 60 days because I got to refinance my house that I bought as a basically a flip. Now I’m living there and I got to refi. So hopefully that happens. Yeah, hopefully that does loosen the market a little bit. You know, as it pertains to us, you know, I’d say just once again, you know, the outbound campaign, if you don’t have it,

in your Dispo repertoire right now, you need to add it. Regardless of the market cycle, calling will always be the most effective form of outreach and selling. So we’ll still be there always as that channel for you. you know, I think it, I don’t see rates dropping enough, you know, in the next year.

for it to make a significant impact to affordability for buyers at the end of the day, or at the end of the transaction cycle. So I do feel like we’re gonna be in a little bit of a tight market for the rest of 2025. know, further than that, I can’t say for sure, but definitely it’s already hit us. mean, 2024 was a lot of wholesalers. I mean, we onboarded over thousand wholesalers in eight months last year and…

People are feeling the squeeze for sure. There’s a squeeze. So it’s already happened. We’re just in it now.

Mike Hambright (27:21.368)
Yep.

Well, you in my experience, I’ve had this conversation a few times over really a lot, like even this week is there’s a ton of people that are thriving right now as well. Right. So in my experience, it’s the people that are putting the right people, processes, systems in place and really doubling down on staying focused on their business. Like those that are like, Hey, maybe I should be a crypto day trader or something that’s better kind of getting shiny object syndrome, or maybe I should jump into another asset class or whatever are the ones that are struggling the most. So the ones

that can’t get out of their own way because they’re either stuck in how it used to be or jumping into other things or struggling and those that are kind of really adopting new technologies like investor base and surrounding themselves with people like an investor fuel that are like figuring out how to put their heads together and kind of run circles around their.

competitors in the market and things like that if you’re if you’re really laser focused on Growing this business a lot of those folks are doing really well right now

Daniel McClam (28:25.295)
Yeah, got to, everybody has shiny object syndrome for sure. You get a lot of that over here just because we get a lot of opportunities put in front of us. So it’s tough to stay in the lane and optimize and focus on the features that will really move the needle the most. I’d say it’s similar for any business.

Mike Hambright (28:45.762)
Yeah, yeah, awesome. Well, Daniel, thanks for joining me today and sharing your story and sharing a little bit more about Investorbase and how to dominate with Dispo.

Daniel McClam (28:53.531)
Yeah, man. Thanks for having me, Mike. Anytime. You too, brother.

Mike Hambright (28:55.224)
Yeah, always good to see you. Everybody, thanks for joining us today. By the way, again, go to investorfuel.com slash investor base, all one word, and you can learn more about the investor-based product. And if you use that link specifically, you get a 14-day trial and $100 off your first month. So it’s a no-brainer to go check it out. And you’re going to find some people right in your market, right in your backyard that are buying that you didn’t even know who they were. And those are new opportunities for you to build relationships and work with those folks. So thanks again, Daniel. Great to see you, buddy.

Daniel McClam (29:23.525)
Yeah man, you too.

Mike Hambright (29:24.854)
Everybody will see you on the next show. Take care.