Once I get the feeling this is not a potential candidate for me, I immediately start to steer them to my competitors.

Despite the cheesy "Free Vacation" promotion I was hoping potential sellers would be more likely to respond to my postcard instead of another competitor because of the free vacation.  

And perhaps, there will be another competitor that comes along and if they have a smoother platform, faster/better customer service, better support tools for both guests and hosts, lower fees, and equal or more choices, then they can overtake AirBnB.

Some competitors might be your friends and you might help each other.  

That being said you have to work pretty hard to be a competitor to be competively good at investing.  

A mini mastermind of local investors who are willing to seriously help each other will be the best thing (sorry, can't think of a better word) you can implementI belong to a private one here and we all are essentially competitors in the same market, but at the same time we also all know that there is more than enough to go around so we help each other out.

You could also look at time series data for listing prices to make a statistical prediction on pricing bands which would help you make an optimal winning offer before a price drop causes an influx of competitor buyers. 

What are the competitors doing?

@Brandon Low I bought the 1/8 of a point to bring my regular guy's loan to the same interest rate as the competitor.

Failing that, see if they'll "meet & beat" a competitor by 10%.