My end buyer walked at 6pm the night before closing over a roof he'd already seen
Small three bedroom, tired but nothing dramatic. I had it locked up and a flipper I'd sold to twice before was taking the assignment. Fee was 9k, which is fine for my market.
He walked the property with me. He was on the roof. He took pictures of the roof. Eleven days later, 6pm the night before we close, he texts that the roof is worse than he thought and he's out.
What had actually happened, and I found this out later from someone else, is he'd gotten into two other deals that week and ran out of cash. The roof was just the thing he could point at.
So I spent that night calling everybody. Ended up with a landlord who I'd talked to exactly once at a meetup, who came in at 6k instead of 9k and made me eat a week's extension with the seller. Seller was a woman selling her late mother's house and she was gracious about it in a way that made me feel worse than if she'd yelled.
The lesson isn't "have more buyers," I had buyers. It's that a buyer who's excited on the phone and a buyer with money in an account are two different people and I had no way to tell which one I had.