If i'm heading down the wrong path I'm hoping to correct my direction at the beginning rather than finding out a year or more down the road when I have more skin in the game. 

@Andrew Michael  I agree with you Andrew, if I was a hard money lender I would be looking for skin in the game.  

They want to know that you have skin in the game and are committed to paying back. 

It provides an intuitive interface and a powerful calculation engine, which would be very costly for us to duplicate.But to make a tool that is both powerful and usable means we have to do a lot more that is not visible to the user as part of the familiar Excel skin.

Unless you are highly leveraged and don't have much "skin in the game" as they say, your cash on cash return will be very low.  

They want you to have you own skin in the game.

Nearly all investors would like to see someone that has some skin in the game.

They have to show skin in the game and something big to lose just like putting money down for a hard money loan to rehab and resale a house.

You have skin in the game now.

I've found an unlisted property that transferred for 23k all cash 5 years ago and is now an abandoned duplex w/ a zestimate of around 105k based on B/B count and sq ft, lot size etc...local etc... no current mtg. listed so I'm scoping it pretty hard as my first wholesale offer...trying to find a realtor that can pull comps for me but since they don't really have any skin in the game nor would they I'm not getting much enthusiasm from so-called Realtor friends that I've had...