With institutional conventional loans a servicer pays from the interest earned these are servicing fees paid by note holder, if interest rates change, the fees do not unless a new servicing agreement is made.Yes, a sandwich lease would be acceptable in this situation, not a lease purchase or rent-to-own as that is a financing agreement.

In the case you described above, you would have to pay all the tax lien holders (including their interest earned) and other fees to bring the property to tax deed auction.Here is one method - others here will have great ideas too.

This is a more secure investment (noteholder gets paid off before the equity holder if anything goes wrong.)

Since an option is the right, but not the obligation to purchase a property, the option holder needs have no intent to close.  

That would be a way of going after existing note holders.

Hi,Looking at the property is most important. if you tell her you can just drive by or look inside to determine if you will make a full offer or if she will have to bring money to the table she may help out more.When you get the address you might be able to google it and at least see the outside and the neighborhood the street view.Short sales take a lot of time and red tape, it has to be approved and the seller will have to prove she can no longer make the normal payments.If that is the case the mortgage holder is looking for a magic number, I have done a few of these.What else is going on with this deal?

Might be able to comment on licensing requirements for note holders in CA.  

After the BK was finalized I then engaged an attny to obtain releases from all previous lien holders.

Note holder is a thread here on BP and several brokers chimed in where we discussed in detail many of the aspects of seller financing.

I got the basic information over phone bed,bath, asking price,title holders.