The more prepared and polished you are, the better your odds.

As always @annbellamy hits nail on head...If a hard money allows you to move forward on a profitable investment after paying the lender, you should strongly consider it, understanding there is risk in the event of nonperformance.

If it's pretty big, you'll also get nailed with higher insurance costs due to the square footage and possibly higher property tax bills.

So, the local broker who nails the collateral closer to what it can be will usually have a higher price, that is from private note holders who don't command the attention at the institutional level.

I'll only chime in to say that Sam Parkins already nailed it.

The great part is the reframing used the existing header and just closed in the excess window width, so inspection was simple because I didn't touch the actual structural members so he just looked at the nailing on the new studs and sheathing on the outside and it was done.After that a coat of stucco top to bottom and paint and the whole house has a different look to it now.

Recently in my area a broker got nailed for mail fraud since he used the mail in connection with his wheeler dealer RE practices.

From that alone we nailed several very profitable properties.In fact it's one of our best leads as far as owner holds as they still want a little bit of action. good luck

I simply go by % of the ARV and the actual cost to buy nailed down as the HUD-1 will show.

You need to nail it down, look at the tax angles, hopeful appreciation, if you buy crappy properties today and you don't improve them, you'll have nothing more than a job, IMO.