Unless you have a ton of time on your hands and pursued time intensive ways to sift thru a lot of dead ends in order to find the deal.

Sifting through hundreds of residential posts to get to the commercial ones is a bad member experience.

But the questionnaire would help me quickly sift through deals and only focus on ones with potential.  

Watch interviews and answers some time.The letter being long trying to explain everything to sift out the serious sellers is a mistake in my opinion.Over the years I do commercial real estate but used to do the owners heading into foreclosure etc.

Has anyone tried going directly to the data and sifting through it?

Sounds like an expensive alternative to me.My (little) experience is that by sifting through these forums you can find what kind of investing you would like to do and you get selfless help from people for free.

The DC newspapers publish everything needed for DC residents, and you can get it on their web sites if you're willing to sift through.

Sift through enough of then and you will find one motivated enough to trade their equity for the speed and ease of transaction.There are also sites like webuyhouses.com.

Use multiple Realtors to help you sift, sort, and screen through all the listings to find the deals 2.

@Jeff Rabinowitz I agree, with listing on Craigslist, I have to sift through a bunch of duds (in some cases i would get straight up scammers) before I get a decent candidate.