My partner said "you're studying a business you haven't started yet" and I can't shake it

Five months watching one corridor in Garfield Heights is real market knowledge, not wasted time. The thing I have never seen work is treating a shared buyer list as a substitute for that, because what happens instead is you end up deferring to someone else's read on a market you actually know better than they do.

You have $23,400 and a specific corridor with comps behind it. That is not a preparation problem, that is an offer problem.

That $23,400 number is the thing I keep coming back to. In most Cleveland submarkets right now a duplex in Garfield Heights is clearing acquisition plus closing somewhere between $60k and $90k depending on condition, so you're not as far off as you're probably telling yourself you are. Five months of corridor watching means you have comps in your head that a first-time buyer who just wired money from Phoenix absolutely does not have, and that local pattern recognition is worth something concrete. The network question and the "should I move" question are actually two different problems you've collapsed into one, and treating them as the same thing is probably part of what's keeping you reading on Saturdays. What is the actual gap between what you have and what a deal in that corridor requires, written down as a real number, not a feeling.

The dispo split research specifically, I have never seen anyone learn their way into a good buyer list. What happens instead is you close one deal badly, overpay on the split, hand too much margin to whoever had the buyers that week, and that embarrassment teaches you more about network structure in a weekend than three months of reading did. The pain is the curriculum. I've run title on probably forty wholesale closings in northeast Ohio over the last two years and the part-timers who figured out their network fast were almost always the ones who got burned on the first handoff and adjusted, not the ones who came in with a framework.

The Garfield Heights corridor thing I actually want to push on because five months of watching without a single offer submitted is a different problem than the learning loop. Watching teaches you price but it doesn't teach you seller psychology or how a conversation actually lands in that neighborhood, and those duplexes on that corridor are not going to hold still forever. I've seen a pocket like that get picked over in about ninety days once one buyer figures out the spread and tells two people. Your $23,400 is not the constraint right now. Making a low offer on something you've been watching since January and having the seller say no is the constraint, because until that happens you don't actually know what you're working with.