Tim,Short Sale (two words) more professionally referred to in the lending industry as a "Short Payoff" means that the institution at hand is accepting less than what is owed to them.

Your state, like mine, allows up to five sales per year to be exempt from the South Carolina Mortgage Lending Act but it sounds like your plan is to ensure compliance and become a registered lending institution.

Yes, loans for under $50k are hard to come by from institutional lenders.

I am not sure who you worked with here but, I can tell you that the biggest problem is the Gary stigma and there are no institutional note buyers that will buy in that area right now.

FDIC usually takes assets over and sells them to other institutions.

And then some of the odd actions taken, which appear as smoke screens, like the fed's instituting a new way to calculate CPI that does not factor in 1/2 of the true mass market factors, so to appear that there is little to no inflation.

Some investor or broker who has done maybe 300 deals has not done enough business to experience enough defaults and funding problems yet...you never know when you'll get squeezed for money.Best way is to line up with a bank or another institutional lender for a line of credit.

As for the question about funding notes at closing, there may be some private folks out there that may still practicipate in this but, no institutions that I am aware of any more.

Also try the FDIC institution directory.

But, I only know of one that offers their own in house financing (I am sure there are many others) and this one company offers their financing as interest only which I think is ridiculous - but I'm not who they are offering the financing to.As far as I know, most of the other financing comes from Thrift & Loan institutions and they are writing loans for investors who CANNOT get loans elsewhere such as offering non-recourse lending on SDIRA accts., self employed buyers and owners who have more than 10 properties financed.