How do you find a realtor exprienced in working with investors?

[Ilya Z.]

What are more effective ways of fidning realtors who have experience working with investors? Not sure if this are unreasonable expectations on my part, but to me what this means is that this person has experience findings off-market properties with motivated sellers before these properties end up on MLS, auction.com and other sites that visible to the whole world.

Other than just the word of mouth, the only other thing I've done is I contacted many listing agents that I found browsing Redfin listings in my area asking this: "I am in investor, I have $X of cash that I can bring to a deal. Do you have experience working with investors and finding distressed off-market properties?". I got just a few responses, which is what I expected, and none of these people brought me any good deals. I can certainly wait for them to find those deals, but I also want to expand my network to work with more realtors to increase chances of one. 

I also realize that those realtors might be working with more experiences investors who keep them busy and bring them more money than I can, at least initially. So how can I find these folks and then get my foot in their door, so to speak?

[Russell Brazil]

Agents are going to list the properties we have. We have a fiduciary duty to those sellers. If you want off market distressed, you need a marketing campaign. Most of the off market stuff agents are dealing with in the current enviorment is highly desireable properties that will draw off market premium pricing. Occasionally Ill see a flippable property in say Petworth in our off market mls system, but again those are drawing premiums and are being traded for all cash.