Where did I go wrong?

[Munir Hassan]

Disclosure Newbie to all of this. Have done some education but still working on it: 

I found a property that was pre-foreclosure.  my wife and I dropped off a number of hand written letters to try and get in touch with the owner. Previously we had spoken with a few agents that were familiar with the owner who said she was spooked by investors and banks in the past. We felt the hand written letter would be a more personal/less investor like approach. 

The letters seemed to have worked. After several weeks we got in contact with the owner and built a rapport. We found out she inherited the house with 100% equity but over leveraged the equity and was now behind on her mortgage. She was thinking of doing a short sale however, before doing so she wanted to securing housing down south (we live in the north east). We told her We understood and would like to see the property and make an offer on her house. She said to wait to do so until she spoke with her lawyer about the move.

Several months go by. We are in touch with her every few weeks just to check in. She tells us we will be the first to know once she is ready to sell the property. 

We’re on vacation and I check Redfine and see the property listed (salty)... We get in touch with the owner who informs us she ended up listing it (duh). The agent refuses to show us the property and says there will be an open house soon. 

We come back from vacation and the agent has an offer at asking price(we didn’t know it was at asking price at the time) and says if we want to see the property we could come at 10am the next day and make an offer by 2pm. 

Long story long, we made an offer below asking and they went with the other offer.

I’m sure we did a bunch of stuff wrong. Should we have just made an offer without seeing the property in the first place? That seemed really risky but there is probably a how to on that. (Searching now) any other glaring things?