A buyer I watched close on a longtime retail bakery found the listing already under someone else's LOI.
She called the broker anyway, then kept calling, about once a month, while the listing sat under contract. A couple of months in, the broker called her back: the other deal had died. She picked up the thread and closed at about $930K, roughly 3.0x SDE.
Nobody else had kept calling that long.
The pattern shows up more than once
I scrape the brokered market daily and spend a lot of my time in searcher communities, watching deals move through pipeline in real time. Looking back over the closings I've followed, at least 5 of them trace to this exact move: a listing that had already gone under contract with somebody else, and a second buyer who stayed close enough to get the call when it broke.
A pair chasing a medical transport company lost the bid outright last year. Someone else came in with a stronger offer and won. But the pair had built a real relationship with the broker and the seller along the way.
So when the winning buyer's deal collapsed a month later, the broker called them first. They closed at $965K, 3.5x SDE, with a couple of forgivable seller notes stitched in to bridge the gap between the lender's math on SDE and the seller's.
Another buyer had spent months chasing a bigger, farther, more owner-operated business and figured she'd lost it to a higher bid. Then, out of nowhere, a broker called about a completely different auto repair shop she'd looked at months earlier. That deal had just fallen out of contract.
By the end of the day she had her pick of two businesses instead of none. She closed the auto shop at $1.1M, around 3.6x SDE.
None of these buyers did anything clever. They just stayed in touch after everyone else moved on.
Standard sourcing advice is about the top of the funnel: more broker calls, more new listings hitting your inbox. That's real, and I'd never tell anyone to stop doing it.
But it optimizes for a narrow slice of supply. A listing that already has a buyer attached drops off most searchers' radar the moment it goes under contract, which is exactly why staying on it pays off.
Why LOIs die in the first place
This only works because most signed LOIs never make it to close. I don't have a clean number on the base rate (my gut says somewhere between a third and half fall apart, and I'll hedge hard on that), but I've watched one buyer's 18-month search rack up over $100K in dead-deal costs across 4 LOIs that died in diligence, and that search never produced a close at all.
The reasons repeat. Financing falls through when a lender's underwriting lands somewhere different from what the buyer assumed going in. Quality of earnings finds daylight between the CIM and reality: I've watched a QoE process on a mid-size industrial deal surface an SDE gap of $150K to $200K against what the seller had claimed, and on another deal the trailing financials just tanked, month over month, right as closing approached.
Working capital and seller-note fights reopen after QoE too. I watched one seller balk when the required seller note jumped from 10% to 15% post-QoE, and that deal never came back from it.
And sometimes it's just cold feet. A seller who won't sign a 5-year non-compete, or one who just can't let go when the papers are actually in front of them.
Every one of those is a listing that goes quiet, and a broker who has to start the search over.
Being deliberately, persistently second
The mechanics here aren't complicated. When you like a listing that's already under LOI, tell the broker directly you want to be the backup if it falls through.
Put a monthly reminder on your calendar to check in on it, not to pester, just to stay visible. A short note that says you're still interested if it dies does more work than people expect, mostly because so few buyers bother sending it.
I'd treat this as a standing line item in your pipeline, not a one-off. Every listing you passed on or lost that you'd still take deserves its own row and its own monthly touch.
The harder version is staying warm with a seller who isn't ready yet, sometimes for a long time. One buyer I followed was sourced a specialty consumer products company with a long operating history.
The owner wasn't ready to sell. She stayed in touch anyway.
13 months into her search, close to going back to a corporate job, she sent one last offer. The owner accepted. The deal itself took another 6 months to close, mostly lease assignment and holiday delays, and landed at about $1.3M.
When the seller becomes the mentor
There's a relationship version of this worth naming on its own. One buyer chased a home care company roughly 4 times the size of what he'd normally target. He lost it to an all-cash, no-contingency offer he wasn't in a position to match.
But he'd built a good relationship with that seller along the way, and the seller stayed in touch as a resource afterward. That seller had bought a small business himself years earlier, scaled it 4x, and was now cashing out slowly. He walked the buyer through the whole playbook.
That reset the buyer's thinking and pointed him back to a smaller home care listing in the Midwest he'd paused on months earlier. It had, in the meantime, gone to a higher bidder. That deal fell through a week later.
He closed it for $615K, about 3.2x SDE.
The listings that skip the aggregators
There's a second-order version of the same instinct. A handful of boutique M&A advisory firms run their own listing pages and don't always syndicate everything to the big marketplace aggregators.
One buyer I know found a deal that way, sourced straight off a firm's site instead of the usual platforms everyone else refreshes every morning. Less competition, mostly because fewer people bother to look.
Remembering who's still in play
None of this works without a system that remembers which listings went under contract, when, and when you last nudged the broker about it. I built the pipeline tracking in Searcher OS around that exact gap, because a sourcing strategy built on remembering to follow up in month 2 is only as good as whatever you're using to remember it.
Most listings go quiet the week they hit LOI. I'd bet the buyers still showing up in these threads 8 months later are the ones who asked to be told when they go quiet again.