If the house burns down, we'll just take the insurance payout, payoff the mortgage, pocket the rest, sell the bare dirt for ~nothing, and walk away.

Sadly, it burned to the ground in 2016.

Realtors, owners, buyers all have gotten burned.  

Awesome to see @Robert Burns!

I agree too, just use a HML or find yourself a money partner who is local as Jay mentioned.That company certainly has done a marketing job on newbies, that fee is to wash out bad deals and not burn up their time.

I can cover my mortgage but are there other ways of financing this project without burning my cash reserves?

@Matthew Samson, I'm all for burning the ships and going all in, but with this in mind, hopefully, you have some reserves saved up.

Hey, so I just got a deed on a tax lien and somebody burned the property down before I was able to get insurance on it in Phenix City, AL…what can I do about that?

So, how do potential buyers come to understand builders who have more flexibility to negotiate prices downward without burning a lot of time?

To which my response was, "so 5 min to complete, 1 hour and 55 min to make sure the new battery doesn't explode in the remote and burn down the entire neighborhood?"