Sure I might add a little to the stigma of shaaaady real estate people as I'm LEARNING, but who really does more damage, little old me making a couple mistakes as I learn by doing, or the guys out there who intentionally snake people out of their money by "teaching", guys even I'VE met at my early level, at REI meetings just doing one big upsell and stealing money from naive people.

The down side of this is you have to install the radiant floor heating system (pex pipe snaked under every square inch of living space-lots of labor cost).

That really opens a can of snakes, not worms.

A snake in the grass is not a problem as long as you know that it's there.I don't think they'll come out smelling like roses either. 

I have outsourced my website to a guy in Thunder Bay, Canada and his pricing and quality are incredible. 

Or is it simply a matter of drains that need to be snaked - $300-$xxxxk(for re-plumb) Exterior Paint - $3-8k depending on the house and your local labor rates.

Snake out lines if needed.

After the second snaking of the drain I had the drain guys run a camera and they diagnosed the problem to be a poorly pitched pipe which is causing waste to build up etc. 

If you have to roll the dice on newbies too many times, you will come up snake eyes eventually.With a larger amount of cash, you can avoid some of these issues which is what I have been able to mostly do but it is still not easy and certainly not low risk.

I, personally do not want to work with the guy at all, but when I'm in a position where I can't ethically contact a motivated seller who is represented by an agent, and the agent is a snake who is working against his client what can I do?