I list my own houses, but this would apply for any realtor listing a client's house or their own.I always get asked this very simple and basic question "Do you have any other offers on the house?"

Nadia, To clear your confusion about showing both parties who I will be representing:4)I ran into some laws about how it’s illegal to wholesale or broker property without a license, unless you let both parties know your equitable interest basically.

One added detail is this other couple are family (my husband's sister) so we need everything written and laid out clearly but with the assumption we will operate within these boundaries without going to court...meaning we don't need every word to be air tight but need it to be clear cut (as a side note I'm not interested in hearing about horror stories of doing business with family, I have done real estate business with family for over ten years and am fine with it). 

I have a few questions in how to start the offer/negotiation and listed the basic details of the property below.How would you structure a seller-financed deal?

The courts had to intervene and nullify the foreclosure sale.You may even want to send someone to the auction and make sure the auctioneer is aware that property was sold prior to the auction sale.

Northwestern Mutual is better but I am loyal and love to be called Captain.Built up cash in LI cannot be sued or taken by the court like in checking or savings accounts.Borrow that out and never pay off rental right away.

I've actually had not so great of experiences with local wholesalers, basically they either send MLS deals or redemption deals that they are pitching at WAY too high of an ARV and WAY too low of a rehab budget. 

The maintenance staff goes out to these properties daily & they send them in to the office staff to catalog, send to owners, make formal estimates, save for evidence in court etc....

this is a great piece of advice. so basically if i can get qualified for a million dollar loan then my loan terms can be better than commercial sub million dollar loan. what do first time investors do typically?

Being 100% financed would basically eat away any possible cash flow for the properties I'm looking at because of the HELOC interest.