As a bit of a follow up to Ardell’s post below about lease purchase options, another option may be seller financing or a seller carryback.  But, if you choose to go this route how will you handle payments?  One of the best ways to make this less of a burden for the seller is to bring in a third party to handle all of the details associated with servicing the loan terms.

Most traditional transactions with conventional bank financing use an escrow service for handling things such as taxes and insurance.  This is similar but the escrow firm is also handling the servicing of payments, calculating interest and principal payments and such.

An example of a company that provides such a service is Contract Servicing.

Always do your due diligence for any company you will hire, but this might be a good place to learn a bit and find that these services exist for a variety of property contract sales and the myriad ways in which they are negotiated.