What is reasonable for the portal's piece of the pie to be?

Plus if you actually read their legalese documents, there is a lot of CYA saying they can basically disappear and/or go bankrupt and you lose everything.What I do is direct deposit a certain % of every paycheck into an investor account (and the rest into my normal checking).  

If offers continue to come in lower then the asking price --- they normally then start to think everyone has it wrong.

Usually its the normal payment, plus whatever she was behind spread out over the term of the "repayment plan" for the monthly, then once they are discharged they just keep paying on the 30 year loan, but who knows.   

Firstly, the and/or assigns is normally out of the question for shortsales and especially for REOs and some agents will balk at it for regular sales.

It seems we will have to just turn over more rocks than normal to find those better deals.

1st non performing normal run 20% to 35% of the UPB and 2nd normal around 8% to 10% of UPB. 

You should normally offer below that to allow some room for negotiation.You should show your numbers with a higher investor discount (and explain why).  

If so is it normally the buyer that will put forth the extra money during the closing

What inspires me the most is the promise of leaving the normal rat race of today's society.