Small Apartments and Master Leases

[Brian Marcy]

I have been house hacking in a duplex for about a year and I'm trying to work on my next deal. I am drawn to small apartment buildings because they seem to have good cash flow potential, multiple tenants under one roof means any one vacancy hurts less, there's less maintenance than have individual free standing properties, and they get me into the commercial world so I can be a more qualified borrower when I'm ready to make the jump to buying properties for NNN leasing. When I say small I mean 10-20 units, although I'm happy to scale up if I can get creative using the resources I'm about to describe.

I don't have a ton to work with (could maybe scrape together $20k if I sold some stuff) but it wouldn't qualify me for traditional financing.  Furthermore, I'm recently self employed so I wouldn't be able to provide two years of tax returns.  Traditional financing is out which leads me to the master lease with option to buy.

Now I'm trying to learn the best way to find and approach sellers.  I'm seeing some properties on loopnet but it sounds like they are often leftover crap, especially since I'm using the free version.  I've read on here that brokers are the best way to find commercial property, but the two challenges I see with that are how they will get paid if I master lease instead of buy, and it also sounds like the places I'm looking for are too small to be worth their time.

I'm thinking it's a numbers game and I should be sending offers to every owner I can find and hope somebody says yes before the post office runs out of stamps.  What does the Bigger Pockets world think?  Do I need to chill out and wait until I'm more qualified? Is there a better way to search?  Is there a better way to finance?