Usually what I do is tell them the house is now gone if I've selected someone else. 

Developing a relationship and understanding the skillset your agent will bring to the table is vital upfront and puts even more responsibility on the buyer to have selected an agent that will get them to the finish line. 

My focus is mostly on land banking, a convenience store, and, more recently, providing judicial services for a select handful of foreign investors.

Both of these are niches that only select banks/lenders specialize with.

However, California may not be the most favorable state for investment due to various reasons such as rent control, anti-landlord legislation, high costs, and high taxes.In this post, I will provide a straightforward process for selecting a city where:Rents outpace inflation: Inflation consistently erodes the purchasing power of a fixed amount of money.

Ill shoot you a DM I know a great broker there that can help in home selection and contract negotiation, but cannot improve the ROI if it simply isn't there

First, whether you are renting or selling these are two rooms sellers and tenants place greater emphasis on when selecting their housing.

The difficulty was not finding properties that would make money, it was selecting the property that would make the most money.  

You have to be quite selective and in some cases make some changes to the property to make it cashflow (ie add a garage, renovations etc).

On average, the profits from such a strategy might be higher in Boulder than all but a select few markets in the country (maybe certain parts of SoCal offer slightly better opportunities?).