Bet your cards on living for very cheap or near free AND appreciation here in California.

That's going to be a tough sell.Well, If you're serious about this then your best bet is probably to find a successful investor actually doing what you want to do (*important*).

ButterflyMX is absolutely an industry leader in visitor management systems, however there are cheaper, safer options with cloud capabilities to grant access to deliveries or any visitor from any remote location.

I bet the probability of someone with one house that desperately needs to sell, is a LOT higher then someone with 2 houses.So you are in fact PAYING money TO reduce your chances of success.And I was just being polite when I said "the probability".

For internet leads the best bet is to get a site like Carrot.comYou can also purchase lists with different motivations like absentee owners, 60-90-120 days late on mortgage, pre-foreclosure, delinquent taxes, water cutoff, code violation, evictions, probate, divorce, etc. and mail or cold call.Other methods are driving for dollars, door knocking, wholesalers, craigslist, Realtors, FSBO sites, expired listings, put out bandit signs, billboards, newspapers, other offline publications.You can use pay per click/adwords, motivated seller website with SEO, facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, and other forms of online and social media marketing.If you have a big budget you can do radio, TV and billboards.

@David Denzy if you have plenty of Hussle you could make it happen, BUT you don't want to get a reputation for saying something and not following through, best bet make sure you have a clause in any contract making it easy to back out, or always have a backup plan.

Utility data, cell carrier data, and usps, your best bet is corelogic.....$$$  And credit bureau data... $$$ as well.Now I'm not saying that every email address and phone number on every lead list is bad....

Dude what is the story there because I bet its great!!!

I closed 6 months ago, so I bet that was an overlay from this particular bank. 

There are some investors who are hedging their bets and buying these properties now believing the rent laws will be over turned.