I am not sure what you need by saying “sellers who need to compete with short sales and REOs”.
Are you asking for a way of identifying all of the sellers who are in a distressed situation? You should have no problem finding a realtor who will perform specific searches in the zip code you want to find all of the short sales, foreclosure sales and REO sales. Similarly it is easy to identify NODs, foreclosures and REOS that are not on the MLS. Again your realtor should easily provide this for you as that is trivial to do and you should have no trouble finding one who does that. I would imagine you can in fact use public resources as well but I don’t use Zip or any of those sites. I am sure people here can help.
Like you I am also in a buy because of family situation. I am taking it slow and actually just recently signed another lease. Don’t let anyone push you into something, take your time and it will happen.
