Companies Owned by Kent Clothier: Stakes, Investments & Exits

Clothier sells tools to people who buy houses for a living, and that is a better business than it sounds. Real estate wholesalers and flippers need two things constantly: sellers willing to accept a discount and buyers ready to pay cash. His software brands address each side. Find Motivated Sellers Now locates vacant and distressed properties; Find Cash Buyers Now lists investors who have actually closed cash purchases; Find Private Lenders Now identifies individuals who fund deals.

These products are sold on subscription, which gives REWW recurring revenue. A user who builds a business around the data has little reason to cancel, so churn is lower than for one-off courses. 1-800-SELL-NOW works on a similar principle, licensing a shared marketing brand and phone number to local operators in exchange for ongoing fees.

Education and community sit above the software. REWW's academy offers a dozen core courses, and The Boardroom Mastermind charges established investors for quarterly meetings and peer access. High-end masterminds carry large annual fees and strong margins, and they deepen customers' attachment to the software. Clothier has said the company has reached more than 20,000 entrepreneurs, and other biographies cite 55,000 students.

Capital requirements are low. Software development and marketing are the main costs, and there is no inventory. The risks are competitive and reputational. Property data is now widely available from rival platforms at falling prices, which pressures subscription rates. As with every company in real estate education, REWW attracts online complaints from dissatisfied buyers, and its customers' fortunes rise and fall with housing turnover. Clothier's long personal brand, built on the story of a large early success, a collapse and a rebuild, is the firm's main marketing asset and its main dependency.

Inside REWW, Clothier is founder, chief executive and, as far as public information goes, sole owner. That gives him full authority over product, pricing and strategy. The company has operated from La Jolla with offices at various times in Scottsdale and Boca Raton, and its leadership has centred on him throughout.

His relationship with REI Nation is where control is easy to misread. The firm began in 2003 as Memphis Invest, founded by Kent Clothier Sr. and his wife. Kent Jr. was part of building it and has described a period, around 2005, when he worked in it alongside his family. Today the company names his father as founder and chief executive and his brothers Chris and Brett as the partners responsible for sales and operations. Kent Jr. does not appear in that list.

Family businesses often separate in this way. One sibling builds an adjacent company that serves the same market while others run the original. The arrangement can leave informal influence and shared marketing in place even without ownership. We see evidence of the latter here, since his biographies continue to cite the family firm's property counts, but no evidence of a governing role.

The licensing brands add a contractual dimension. 1-800-SELL-NOW is licensed to local operators, which means REWW has obligations to licensees about how the brand is used and protected. The Boardroom has members who pay for access to Clothier personally. Both create dependencies on him that a larger management team would dilute. Key-person risk is therefore high. If he stepped back, the software would keep working, but the mastermind and much of the marketing would lose their central attraction. A named second-in-command with real authority would make the company easier to value and to sell.

Clothier's investing philosophy has a name, reverse wholesaling, and it came out of failure. After leaving the family grocery business around 2000 he put his money into a venture that collapsed. Starting again in South Florida in 2003, he wholesaled 91 houses in 18 months by reversing the usual order: find the buyers first, learn exactly what they want, then go and source it.

That insight explains every product he later built. Find Cash Buyers Now, released in 2009, turned his manual process of identifying active buyers into software. 1-800-SELL-NOW, launched in 2006, did the same for attracting sellers. He was productising his own workflow, and the timing after the 2008 crash, when thousands of new investors entered the market, was favourable.

He has also invested directly in houses. Biographies say he has bought and sold more than 2,300 properties since 2005 and holds over 100 as rentals. Memphis, where his family's firm operates, is a classic cash-flow market with low purchase prices and solid rents, and Florida adds appreciation potential. Owning there is consistent with what he teaches.

We consider his software the best investment of his career in terms of return on capital. It cost little to build, scaled nationally and produced recurring income. His property holdings are a more conventional store of wealth. What is missing from the record is any evidence of outside ventures, funds or equity stakes in other companies. He appears to have reinvested mainly in his own brands and in rental homes. That is a conservative allocation, and it leaves his fortune closely tied to the health of small-scale real estate investing in the United States. He has not, on the available record, diversified into the stock market or other industries.

Clothier's most important exit was a departure, and it cost him. He joined the family's grocery trading company in 1988, helped it grow to about $1.8 billion in sales, and left around 2000. Some accounts describe the business as having been acquired at that scale. He then lost his savings in a new venture and, in his words, went from a very large business to broke in two years.

That episode is the foundation of his teaching, and it also clarifies what he did not have. He was an executive and family member in the grocery firm, with no documented controlling stake, so there was no founder's payout to cushion the fall. The lesson he drew, about depending on one's own systems and time, runs through his later companies.

Since rebuilding he has kept what he created. REWW, the software brands and 1-800-SELL-NOW have not been sold, and no investment from outside has been reported. His involvement with Memphis Invest faded as his own company grew, but that was a shift of role within a family, not a sale that has been disclosed.

Could he exit REWW? Software with recurring revenue in a niche market is attractive to larger property data companies and to private equity, and consolidation in real estate technology has been steady. The education and mastermind components would be worth less to a buyer and might be separated. We would expect any deal to include a multi-year commitment from Clothier to stay involved. At the property level, his house flips, more than 2,300 by his count, are exits in the ordinary course of business, and the rental homes can be sold individually whenever he chooses. None of those would be reported publicly, which is why his realised gains from property are invisible.