Which comes first, the financing or the deal?

[Tessa Rysztak]

I have a logistical question, I cant wrap my head around how this all works.  

I keep hearing and reading, "If you find the deal, the money will come".  So how do you SECURE the deal, while looking for the money?  Do you just put in an offer contingent on financing?  Or does that only work when using mortgage financing?  In our current situation, we are looking at hard money or possibly a private investor.  When we have purchased personal residences in the past, we have always submitted a loan preapproval letter to our realtor and that was included with our offer.  But you can 't really get a preapproval for a hard money investing deal.  And I know that, in general, by the time I can find the money, the deal will be gone.  

Please help clear this up for me!

[Jeff McCaskey]

@Tessa Rysztak

Well in that case...... if you can find good enough deals and/or you live in or invest in a market that supports the sales prices you need to use the more expensive hard money and you use hard money because you don't have access to private money, then by all means - first make sure make sure make sure you have done your homework homework homework and go use the HML and buy sell buy sell buy sell until you have your own pile of $$$ to use at a much cheaper interest rate than HML's