Does that mean the buy box was right and my sourcing was slow, or was he shopping two lists at once?
Both, probably. Buy box being right doesn't mean your pipeline had any urgency to it.
I had a buyer in Maple Heights do the same thing to me in 2022, closed on a Turney Road double through another wholesaler while I had two deals under LOI that matched his criteria exactly. Took me maybe six weeks longer to move than the other guy and that was enough.
Some buyers just stay on every list they can find until something closes, that's not disloyalty, that's how they protect their own deal flow.
Ninety days with no close is long enough for any buyer to quietly start answering other people's emails. I had a guy in Maple Heights in 2022, fed him four properties over about four months, and he closed through a wholesaler out of Akron on a deal I had already walked. Found out after the fact he'd been on that list the whole time, just never mentioned it. The part that stung wasn't the deal, it was the six months of relationship work I'd put in that basically subsidized somebody else's commission.
The tell is usually whether he asked you for seller contact info directly at any point. That is the move buyers make when they are about to cut you out, and it almost never happens without a reason.
Three pitches in 90 days with no feedback loop on why he passed each time is the part I have never seen work. What actually happens is the buyer finds a version of your deal somewhere else and genuinely believes it was a different deal.
Require a one-line "why not" after every pass before you bring the next one, even if it feels awkward to ask.
Garfield Heights duplexes in that rent roll range do move fast right now, faster than most wholesalers price in when they're building their timelines. Three pitches across 90 days with no close tells me the deals were probably close but not landing at his actual return threshold, not that he was disloyal. Buyers at that price point usually have a pretty tight cap rate floor and "similar" on paper can still miss by enough to pass.
The thing I'd want to know is what his response was each time, specifically. A hard pass with a reason is totally different from going quiet. Quiet three times in a row while he's closing elsewhere, that's parallel sourcing and you were probably one of two or three lists he was running. A pass with a reason every time actually means your buy box read was correct and your acquisition math was slightly off, which is fixable. Those are two completely different problems and the fix for one makes the other worse if you mix them up.
The part that matters is whether his closing was on a property you ever touched. If it was something you sourced and he bought it through a different wholesaler, that's a list problem. If it was a property you never had under contract and he found it another way, that's just two pipelines running at the same time and you can't really hold that against him.
I had a buyer in Cleveland same situation, Slavic Village, SFRs in the 900-1100 a month rent range, three passes from me in about four months. He closed on something in that zip through a direct mail seller before I ever got to it. Stung at the time but when I pulled the deed he paid 12k more than what I would have had it under contract for, so my sourcing wasn't slow, his tolerance for retail just went up when he got impatient. That's actually useful information. Means next time I know he'll stretch on price when he's been sitting too long, so I started bringing him deals with a little less margin cushion and closed two back to back. The duplicate list question is almost beside the point if you don't know his actual ceiling when he's been dry for 90 days.
