Ethical dilemma (or not?)

[Kris Fox]

I am a hard money/private money lender/rehab-er in my area. I had a lunch meeting with a rehab-er about a project he was considering. He showed me the property he was looking at and gave me all of the details (it happened to be an REO listed on MLS). We parted ways with me telling him he needed to meet x-criteria for me to consider the note.

Meanwhile... my realtor/investment finder and I had been discussing several properties over the prior week to my lunch meeting we were going to be putting offers in on. The way my realtor and I typically work is he knows I just want to hear numbers. Well, one of them sounded good and I asked for more information and I find out that it's the same property the investor I had lunch with was interested in.

I want to put an offer in on the property myself, but I know it's going to look shady as if I poached a deal from the investor. Even though I know it didn't happen like that, it's still going to look bad. On top of that, it came from a publicly listed-source that everybody has access to. What would you do?

[Andy Collins]

if you put in an offer in your name, you realize the rehabber will tell everyone he knows how you "burned" him,,,why not call him and explain you were approached about the property,, and wanted to see if he was moving forward with it, because if he wasn't, you were