The Real Estate Funnel

[Account Closed]

I've read several times about the idea of a real estate funnel: generate hundreds of leads, analyze a subset of those, make offers on a subset of those, and have a subset of those accepted. That makes total sense to me. I do have two questions about it, though:

1. What if multiple offers are accepted, but I can only afford one? What contingencies can I put in the offers to avoid getting stuck in this case? I suppose an easy alternative is to only make one offer at a time, but let's assume I didn't do that.

2. At what stage do I approach people (banks, individuals, whomever), for financing? Before I make an offer? After an offer is accepted? If I'm working with a bank, I can get pre-approved well in advance, but what if I intend to work with a private lender?