@Natalie Kolodij @Chris MasonI agree.One of my three hour workshops for SJREIA (South Jersey REIA) was about how to get financing for investing, and the first thing I teach is that a bank's job is  to lend money to people who don;t need it, so the overdressed, but dress for success, skip the jeans. the lender's biggest concern is, "how are you going to pay us back?"

I recently started skip tracing as well using Batch Skip Tracing.

However, your best bet is to skip trace the owner first and get it before it goes to auction.

1) Use a tool like Prop Stream to search for cash buyers near your subject property & skip trace through Skip Genie or Spokeo.2) Pull sold transactions out of the MLS in your zip code and call the brokers/ask if they still have cash buyers. 3) Export LLC's and Absentee owned properties in your zip code sold in the past 6 months - a year out of list source skip trace and call or mail them. 4) Search your city in the massive FB groups.

Of course, if you'd like to skip that learning curve and focus on getting the deals done, there are companies who can help you get online and do the advertising for you very effectively (see 10BillionLeads.com for example).Remember, you ultimately want to own your investing business, not run it.  

We have a correction and you're caught holding a property you can't sell for a 10% discount of what you paid for it especially with this tenant who skipped out on 2 months of rent.

If that's tricky, think about hiring debt collectors or skip tracing services to find the tenant.

I do not know if it is principal things, but rather, it is more a trust issue to me.If I find out a wholesaler tries to make a quick buck off other whosaler's property or from MLS listed property, I would try to skip him and buy from the source, i.e.

Have you tried getting a list of all owners of all the multifamily properties in your area and skip trace their phone numbers?  

You can not skip this step or you will get some stuff you don't really want.