One is so I had a decent amount of skin in the game from the borrower, and also to make my note more valuable if I ever needed to sell it.

Another thing to consider for best is that technology allows one to track whether or not their investor base is accredited over time quite easily where a stale subscription agreement would only provide this verification at a single point in time without irritating their investors.

Assumption is a renter will not take as good care of your place (especially if you're a distance away) as if they had skin in the game for ownership.

The Foreclosure time frame is why HML now want higher credit from borrowers and skin in the game.

Even with flipping if you use hard money the lender will want skin in the game ( money down and points ) to do the loan.The reasoning is if the rehab gets tough the HML wants it to be painful for you to walk versus just handing it back to them.A good contact for flips is J Scott on here.

You typically need to have skin in the game, but at the same time you certainly don't want to drain all of your personal reserves if you don't have to (i.e. if you used up all of your reserves on a traditional downpayment w/a bank - not only would it be gone, but then what's next?

I don't have the skin in the game necessary to create interest.

Perhaps we don't understand what Mortgage Insurance really does and we are just irritated it means as a borrower more money is paid to service the debt.

So in other words, even though you might have an LTV of 25% the bank may not let you get back the money you put in as then they will be the only one with skin in the game.

No real rule of thumb to say a discount will be X%, depends on many factors.I agree with Wayne that you'd be better off with private money, problem is they are usually short term, but there are some little old ladies that would love to get 8/9% for 10 years for the grandkids, but that has other issues too.Now, if you're buying a 100K property for 70K you might do a 90K loan and you may get the 70K, the trick is not to go over the market value of the property and show that you have skin in the game or compensate for the skin like a pledge of other assets.