You need some info in order to get the best deal.
1) Your county registrar of deeds will have a list of all liens against the property. Liens include mortgages, home equity loans, and any debts owed to contractors that have not been paid. This information will include how many $ are owed and what date the debt was contracted. It may also include the interest rate or other terms. This information may be online.
Sadly, you can't always just look up the property by the street address. You may need some other identifying info like a property id, book #, plat #, page #, etc. That info can often be found on MLS or Zillow or your county's property tax system (which may also be online).
2) If the loans you find out about didn't have an interest rate available to you, you can make an educated guess using the month prior to the loan date (to account for the time it takes to close after locking in the rate). I just google for historical us mortgage rates and pick the first likely one. Here's an example:
http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/pmms30.html. Use the mortgage rate times that fit the loan if you know them, otherwise guess it's a 30 year fixed.
3) Now that you have the $, the date, and the interest rate, go to a mortgage calculator like
https://www.drcalculator.com/mortgage/. Fill in the info and let the calculator do its magic. It will tell you what the remaining balance on the loan would be.
4) Repeat the above process for each loan.
Ta Da! You now have a reasonable estimate of what the person still owes. No guarantees, but at least it's based on reasonable info.
Why use that?
Well, let's say the person still owes $325,000 and will have to pay 6% to the realtor. Toss in a few thousand for closing costs and you're at a $350,000 price point. They can't go any lower without coughing up cash at the closing table which, as you've discovered, most American's cannot do.
But let's say they only owe $280,000 on the property. That means that it's possible for them to accept a much lower price without having to come up with cash. You could offer them around $302,000 and they would break even. $312,000 and they would walk away with $10,000 which might cover their moving costs to a new place.
I hope that makes sense to you.
What happens if they owe nothing on the property? At that point, no bank has to be involved at all if they are willing to "be the bank". We know that the laws tend to favor the bank! If they don't need all the cash up front at the time of sale, they might be willing to be paid on a monthly basis. Instead of putting that cash in the bank at 0.05% interest, you could pay them 2.0% interest, or 40 times more than they could get in the bank.
Let's say you settle on $320,000 at 2.0% for 30 years. That would be $1182.78 a month. You could prepay 12 months of payments ($14,193.36) to demonstrate that you have skin in the game, or . Please note that I did not say "make a down payment"", I said pre-pay. What's the difference? If you make a down payment, your next payment is due in one month. If you instead make a year's pre-payment, your next payment isn't due for a year. Details matter!
Why does that matter? If you are going to buy something to flip it, you want to tie up as little capital in it as possible. It cuts down your risk and lets you do more deals for the same amount of capital.
Now, those are just strategies for getting a better price.
It has nothing to do with whether you should actually buy the place.
For that, you need to know how to run the numbers. Get the books recommended in the sticky thread in this sub-forum and read them. Learn how to do the numbers.
Buying real estate with just a vague idea of how to run the numbers leads to the horror stories from folks who got burned in real estate. Real estate is a numbers game and there's no substitute for knowing how to figure them out correctly.
