Buying foreclosures and preforeclosures

[Monte Blunk]

For the last 10 years my husband and I have done live-in flips and done well and bought 2 rentals that we flipped and then rented. We have bought our flips/houses/rentals through the MLS listings usually at Market price. After reading and listening to blogs on this sight I feel we have completely missed the boat on looking at foreclosures, preforeclosures and whole sale options. We are very interested inthe BRRR strategy because we have been doing it without even realizing we were doing it, but really not at the pace that we want to start getting into.

We would love to learn how to go about buying pre-foreclosures/whole sale homes etc.  We don't have enough cash to buy at auction so that seems like it is not really an option for us ... yet.  Our questions are:

1.  How do people approach buying properties that are in preforeclosure?  It seems somewhat complicated and not a sure thing unless you have all your ducks in a row.  Do most preforeclosures actually go to auction or become bank owned?  Do you need to buy them with cash?

2.  How do people buy foreclosures and banked owned properties?  Do you need cash to buy foreclosures or can you use conventional loans?

3. What ways do people finance BRRR properties? I have a full time job that pays well so we would qualify for a refinance but don't really know how to get the initial buying of the property done. My husband wants to do this full time and put all his energy into finding and flipping the properties. As far as financing have people used home equity loans or loans on their 401K to do this? Is that possible? We have 3 properties with around $500K of equity between them and enough for a small down payment (20-40K), Just wondering what ways people have made this work for them and what is possible.