My first year I spent six months building relationships with buyers before I had a single property to show them, and that sequence is the whole thing.

The sequencing point is correct and the mechanism behind it is sound. When you know the buyer's spread requirement before you lock up the property, the ARV work becomes a constraint you can design around rather than a number you hope pencils out afterward. You are essentially running the analysis backwards, starting from the buyer's minimum and working toward the maximum allowable offer, which is how the math stays honest.

The assumption doing the most work in your approach is that your 23 buyers stay active and their criteria stay stable. Cash buyer lists go stale faster than most operators expect. A fix-and-flip buyer who needed a 30% spread in one market condition might need 35% six months later when carrying costs shift or when their lender tightens terms. The relationship infrastructure you built is real, but it needs maintenance the same way a seller pipeline does. If you are not talking to those buyers between deals, you may find the criteria in your spreadsheet are outdated by the time you call.

The risk you did not mention is what happens when a property falls outside the criteria of everyone on your list. Even a well-built buyer list has edges. A deal that is unusual in size, condition, or location can sit even when you have strong relationships, because relationships do not override a buyer's model. That is where having geographic or deal-type overlap between buyers in your list protects you, so that any single property has at least a few realistic fits rather than one obvious match and ten long shots.

The 11-day close on your first deal is partly a function of the buyer already knowing you, which compressed a step that eats most beginners' timelines.

How often are you actively updating the criteria in your spreadsheet, and do you re-verify before you sign or only when you are ready to call?

The assumption doing the most work here is that 23 buyers with documented criteria stay active and liquid when you finally have a deal.

Buyer-first wins when your market is thin; seller-first wins when motivated sellers are so rare that building a list first means you never practice the acquisition conversation.

The eleven-day close is real, but I'd push back on one thing: 23 buyers before your first contract is a long time to be building a list you have not stress-tested yet. I had 14 names in my Cleveland market before I signed anything, called all 14 when I finally locked a duplex on the east side, and six of them bounced back with criteria that had shifted since I last talked to them. Two had stopped buying entirely. What I actually had was eight, not fourteen, and one of those eight was the one who closed it. The list decays faster than you think and the only way to know if a buyer is real is to send them a live deal with a deadline on it.