@Brian Cowan  Richards point is signing a mortgage application with any false info on it is mortgage fraud end of discussion.there are many many RMLO sitting in prison right now for helping their borrowers doctor their finance's  keep that in mind.Now my commercial loans at my commercial bank do not show on my credit.. but they are construction loans... custom LOC's for buying distressed assets..

You can only advise/threaten them with the penalties for filing a false lien. 

Standard of living is so much better elsewhere.I'll happily pay taxes and live here, in my much larger than 900 sq/ft house that I paid just over $200K for, (my master bath has so much floor to ceiling travertine, you'd think you were in a Vegas hotel - far cry from a shack) where I have a dozen palm trees on my 1/4 acre yard with a pond, 365 day a year vegetable & herb garden, 300+ days a year of not just sunshine, but clear skies and shorts/t-shirt & flip-flops weather, beaches, snow, mountains, desert, forests and resort living lifestyle, (not even to mention the absurd income opportunities) than get paid to live in Washington.

Lest we forget, it was the 'really smart guys who we should blindly trust because they work for banks' who got the ball rolling down the path to financial destruction, realized in 2007, not Cleetus the Slack-Jawed Wholesaler.If the credit crisis has anything to do with the wholesale debate, it is that the guys on the front lines were pumping false information into the system.  

Take the number and see what they tell YOU.500k/ (5 units) is 100k/unit250k/ (5 units) is 50k/unit  and adding more units drives this into absurdity 250k/50 is 10kJust like you can't get a Porche 911T for 10k, you will not be please with anything in the 10k/unit range IMO. 

-Why it may be a bad decision- Analyze what could go wrong or what assumptions could prove false, internally or externally, and how that may affect my investment.

That is false.

And people are fickle and may have false impressions on the smallest and most insignificant things, and might ignore the important things entirely at the same time.

Your assumptions, however, are totally false to the point where I say "Crack pipe thinking."

I agree with @Bruce Runn writing an offer and then having title company do all the work for more than 2% is absurd.