You can go to regional and local banks and ask about unsecured lines of credit.Look into business lines of credit.Stagger the maturities of your private loans.Keep some HELOC capacity on your personal residence available.Make sure your investor understands how well their investment is performing, and encourage them to look to other cheaper avenues to raise the funds that they need.Encourage your investor to only invest a portion of their portfolio for illiquid asset like private loans, notes, and real estate equity, keeping a healthy percentage in marketable securities or other liquid assets.

That would be more than an 8 CAP with upside.I would try to structure it this way.70% 1st 5yr Fixed/30yr ammortization $1,400,000 @ 8% = $10,30015% 2nd 5yr Balloon $400,000 @ 10% (5+5)= $175010% Down $200,000DCR of 1.13 is on the riskier side, but if your fairly sure you can get the theatre going it would jump to a very healthy 1.47.You would have a cash flow of over $1500 per month with a potential to earn over $5000/month.The seller get 1.6M now for a property that is not selling, but still gets fair value.If you can get a lower price, all the better.Dominic EneaCommercial Agent

I appreciate all your help in advance and look forward to being an active BP member.Hope you all have a happy, healthy and successful new year (because I know I am!)

A healthy skepticism is needed to ensure this community does not get taken over by the "guru's" or anyone who makes bold claims they can't back up :)

Overall I am a very healthy man, I work out every day, but there is one thing that is my kryptonite and that is BS.

But because I've owned my home for 15+ years the mortgage is low enough that there is a healthy spread between rents and my total expenses on the home (including maintenance, insurance, property taxes, etc.), giving me a good monthly income.How do I value the buy vs. rent when the property has appreciated healthfully?

Since seller-financed and seller would be putting down $20K, which is a healthy down, but no docs required.

Rents in Detroit actually went into decline with the abundance of foreclosures there, because those fresh foreclosures sold so cheaply that landlords could hit their target cashflow with lower rents - so they lowered rents to attract tenants thus leaving other landlords who had paid more previously now stuck with trying to find tenants in that declining market.But in a healthy area, rents will be typically increasing by a "cost of living" factor - 3% to 4% in most years.

. - If I want to buy and hold there needs to be a healthy rental demand. - In the past in other neighborhoods I was shown really good deals by brokers and others but I had to find out through word of mouth that there was a glut of rentals and many remained empty.

I agree that the longer term view for rentals is probably pretty healthy, but having lived through the 80s bust, I'm fairly cautious.