My inheritance landed me on a micro-wholesaler network's list somehow and I do not know how to feel about it

The probate record part is not shady, that is just public information and wholesalers have been mining it for decades. What I would actually sit with is the 34k gap, because auditor values in Lorain County run behind and sometimes run low, so the question is not whether 118k was an insult but whether it was an insult relative to actual comps or relative to a number the county printed two years ago.

What do the rents look like on the two units right now?

What happened to you is common and worth understanding, because it will probably happen again.

When someone dies and a property transfers through probate, that filing becomes a public record. Probate records name the new owner, often include the property address, and are routinely pulled by data services that wholesalers and their networks pay for. "Skip tracing" just means they took your name from that record and found a phone number to go with it. Courtney did not know you personally. She, or someone in her network, ran a list.

The $118,000 offer being $34,000 under the county auditor's value is not unusual for this kind of outreach. Wholesalers need to buy below market so there is room for their fee and still leave the end buyer a deal. The auditor's assessed value is also not the same thing as what the property would sell for on the open market, so I would not treat either number as the real figure without a proper valuation from a licensed appraiser or a comparative market analysis from a local agent.

The thing worth sitting with: you do not have to be moving at anyone else's speed. You inherited a duplex. The legitimate questions, keep it, rent it, sell it through a traditional sale, sell it to an investor, are yours to answer in your own time. Nobody's voicemail creates a deadline.

If you want to know what the property is actually worth, a licensed appraiser or a local real estate agent can give you a grounded number. That number is the baseline for any decision.

Where are you on the bigger question? Do you have a sense yet of whether you want to hold the property or sell it, or is that still completely open?

The skip trace on a fresh probate filing is standard sourcing for wholesalers, and the speed feels aggressive because it is designed to. The 34k discount off the auditor's assessed value is the part worth sitting with, because county auditors in Ohio notoriously lag market conditions by one to three reassessment cycles, which means the actual gap between her offer and what you could sell for on the open market may be considerably larger than 34k, or in a softer pocket of Lorain County it could be smaller. The auditor number is a floor for the conversation, not a ceiling, and she knows that.

What I do not see anyone ask yet is what the current rent roll looks like on those two units. That number changes the entire calculus of whether you are even in the right conversation. A duplex producing 1,800 a month gross in Lorain County at a 118k basis is a meaningfully different asset than one sitting vacant through an estate transition, and the wholesaler's offer is almost certainly priced assuming the latter. If the units are occupied and leased, the income figure sets a cap rate floor that makes the 118k offer look worse by a specific, calculable amount rather than just a gut feeling. What are the units renting at right now, or were they occupied when you inherited?

The assumption doing the most work in that call is that you are motivated, and the $34k below auditor figure is calibrated to test that assumption rather than to reflect actual value. Auditor assessments lag the market and run conservative in many Ohio counties, so 118k on a duplex that audits at 152k might be a reasonable wholesale offer, a low one, or a genuine steal for them, and you will not know which until you have a rent roll and a current comparable sale analysis in front of you. What she did with the probate record is entirely legal in Ohio: those filings are public, skip tracing is a standard data purchase, and inherited property is a predictable source of motivated sellers, so the call itself is not the problem. The problem is that you are being asked to make a major financial decision before you have decided what you want, which is exactly the condition that network is trained to find. Before anyone else calls, get a licensed appraiser who works in Lorain County to give you a number you can use as a floor, because that floor is the only thing that converts "I don't know how I feel" into a position you can negotiate from. What are the two units currently rented for, or are they vacant?