Which he accepted.

I am not in any neighborhoods like that, and even then I have to weed through a lot of suspect wannabe tenants to get tenants that are acceptable.  

Did you come in with the $51k offer and the owner accepted?

There is no point putting it into the plan in the first place if your only intention is to pull it back out immediately in a loan.For someone who has had a 401k for some time and contributed over many years, this "hidden cost" of losing the deferral basis of the 401k funds is acceptable if the use of the borrowed funds will be of real benefit such as getting them started in real estate investing.  

They accept your offer or counter, you accept their  counter or counter.

Aside from that, you can call the bank and make an offer on it, they can either accept or decline based on what it is worth.  

I don't see how a buyer would want to pay more than list to cover your fee... i agree the agent would have to cut her fee in hopes of getting the future sell side.. i would do that with a written exclusive. 

@Russell Brazil In your professional opinion is it better to make an offer first, then if your offer gets accepted have the inspection done?

What factors are critical to making the deal work for me along with hopefully a higher acceptance rate from seller?

We were very very careful to make sure this wouldn't happen because of all the interest in the property and it's common for people to pull these shenanigans to get a property under contract and accepted for a ridiculous price and then later back out and reduce the offer for the "appraised value" so we wrote a special clause into our counter proposal.On top of all this the roofer that I had hired took my $1k and ran off with the material money and also hired and scammed another roofing company that tore off the existing roof.