So I recently learned that I am going to have a hard time getting a high pre-approval letter. This made me realize it is going to be hard to use an agent and go through the MLS because almost all sellers want to see a pre-approval letter before letting you in the door. I remembered that @BrandonTurner said using craigslist and searching for available rentals and telling the owner you didn't want to rent but potentially buy any properties they had for sale had worked out well for him a few times. Well I decided I'd give this a shot to be more proactive in searching and hopefully find a motivated seller financing deal. What I recently learned though is that the craigslist pro ap for your iphone will have a default email set up. How this works is you set up an auto response (like building a template), write your response and save it with any name you want. Basically you can then press the email button and press the template and the email is sent to the ad. I found this to be incredibly time efficient and so far over the past 2 days I have been able to reply to almost every single posted vacancy in the area. Already within just 2 days of easy but very aggressive emails I have well over 15 responses all saying once their vacancies are filled they might have a few properties they'd be willing to sell. Obviously it will probably take another 100 people to respond but hopefully with this many people I am getting in touch with I can find a property that fits my criteria, at a reasonable price, while also finding someone I can help make passive cash flow through seller financing. A win-win with just an hour or so of work each day.
