Is it pure lunacy or is there some real truth behind it?

Are you looking purely for investment and cashflow purposes? 

The gap from $40/ft to $400 to build seems incomprehensible, mostly just pure profit for the contractor. 

If a deal like this actually existed, and the borrower only wanted $180K, then, yes, this might be a reasonable purely asset based loan.

I also would stay away from pure cotton.

I think if anyone said with any amount of certainty what kind of appreciation you might expect 10/20/30 years from now in Gary, it would be pure speculation on their part.

That being said, I do understand that leverage is a valuable tool in REI and from a purely numbers perspective it makes sense, especially with the incredibly low interest rates available today.

---We're not perfect and some of our ServiceTechs occasionally forget, phone batteries die, or they take worthless pics, or like with a sewer snaking sometimes nothing is pulled out, but we deliver at least 95% of the time.Regardless, you should automatically be receiving an invoice with a decent description of the work performed.

If you answer no to all of the above, then what you saw is purely speculative.

Commissions are purely fee based.Secondly, our profit is NOT paid by the seller directly since they are underwater.