All but two of my mortgages are commercial, and I don't even speak with the residential lending arm at my bank anymore.

How do my arms look?

So you and your agent need to look at the data for comparable pending and (very) recently sold homes, as well as whatever active homes may be available - because solds and pending aside, the value of this prospective home will be comparatively lower if there are 15 similar homes on the market for buyers to look at compared to if there are just one, two, or zero other homes like this for buyers.And I know it's tough with HUD homes because they don't take escalators, but in the end, armed with your market analysis data, you need to bid your 'walk away' price, meaning that if you bid a dollar under what it goes for you'd be OK with not getting it, rather than kicking yourself and wishing you had bid a dollar more.

@Boris SuchkovI thought I made that more than explicitly clear, it's called disciplined fiscal spending.

If this were regular arms length transactions, how in the world would that work, especially without any paper? 

@Toye AdeyemoMy contract explicitly defines normal closing costs as section 1100 of the HUD form.

after I made it explicitly clear this is investment only!

Non-arms length deals often cloud investment decisions...Honest and direct question -- if they want to sell it, "so they can fund other investments", that means they've come to the conclusion that more attractive IRR is elsewhere. 

But it is very important that you make that an arms length transaction. 

They are usually 5/5 ARMS but have more lenient terms... and sometimes will lend on the rehab.4.