You pay them something now for the written right to purchase the home at a later time.

A lot of sellers who offer this kind of deal know full well that the tenant is VERY unlikely to correct their situation and be able to get a loan to close the deal even 2 years later.

To me, it's a good sign that mom reached out directly so she isn't taken by surprise later.  

made an offer on a property only to find out later that one of the units was going through an eviction.tried to extend our inspection contingency to no avail to buy us some timeended up not being able to come to terms on how to proceed with sellerthe last HOUR of our inspection contingency the seller offers to try and buy out (cash for keys) the tenant the next day (he had a property manager handling the eviction and wasn't even aware of it initially).i get a (risky) oral agreement that even though the contingency window had passed, if the plan falls through my client will still get their EMD back the next day the seller ends up buying out the tenant for a bit over $3,000 and now we can move forward with the deal without the headache of a problem teanant/ picking up an eviction.

You will learn things you could never have expected, and 90% of tenants are happy and willing to discuss, and maybe even show you some things that will help you out later. 

I ended up selling it 4 years later for a huge gain after several developers came in and built up the rest of the street. 

Because later, you can easily use it as your mailing list!

I had a client of mine go hard money and than he refied 6 months later out of the hard money loan.

I would seriously offer them choice of cash offer on it or MLwO, and I'd prefer the later so I'd frame it that way.

You need to know how to do all the different types of deals sooner than later so that you have optimized your deal conversion capabilities as MOTIVATED sellers are hitting you and your organized network you are to build.