Now, we all know that the gamble is that they "always will" renew & many have been caught with their 5 years ending in a bad lending year putting you at risk of the balloon payment coming due with the bank taking a pass on renewing.

Your guy may have a substance abusers or gambling problem.Everyone has a part in this.

My name is John Lowe. I've been married for 22 years, and have 2 awesome daughters (12 & 18). I'm very interested in beginning my 2nd "career" in real estate. My focus is to buy and flip residential single-family ...

Not into gambling anymore.Swanny

So I ask and they just say "give me the original plans and 10k and we'll go from there" but that seems like a gamble.

New to the site and the real estate investing world, starting to learn and completely consumed by the learning process - thrilled to have found this site.

He will be more knowledgeable than I am on your rights and best approach to collect damages.I should not recommend this and it has some risk (but probably worth the gamble) but if your system fails you could try what the person that sold me the property did and try to ignore the demand to hook to sewer and hope the city never checks. 

I am pretty sure it would not even cash flow at 5% ($7,000 down).Now if you thought it would double in price in the next three years, that's a different story, but not one I would gamble on. 

I'd let him be someone else's gamble. 

I do these types of deals when I don't want to tie up a ton of cash or I am not really thrilled about X price but willing to put a property out there and see if it sells.Hope that helps!