Many members are experts in their respective fields related to real estate investing, whether that is real estate brokerage, wholesaling, flipping, buy and hold, lending, self-directed IRA and Solo 401k investing, or tax and legal guidance.There are some pretty cool discounts on various products and services offered as Perks to BP members that you might want to check out: https://www.biggerpockets.com/perks/proIf you haven’t checked it out already, the Bigger Pockets blog features links to their awesome podcast and many great articles: https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/The site has quite a few tools that can be helpful for new members.

If you know you have a private lender willing to lend you enough for the project than I'd get the house under contract.

No one really know what the lending environment will be like 5 years from now.  10 years ago it was incredibly focused around asset based lending. 

@Jeff LI would focus on going with a lender that is investor friendly, that can lend in NY. 

If you are looking at getting into flipping houses, the banks are going to be less likely to finance you since you have no experience so you will likely need to look for private financing or take money out of a 401-K or go to a hard money lender (they will either charge you crazy interest or not lend to you but I'm not really sure since I'm not too familiar with hard money lenders). 

You could try a hard-money lender but they may not lend based on lack of experience.

What LTV will they lend to?

We buy wholesale deals and do private lending on secured flips locally for professionally prepared deals with all the i's dotted and t's crossed.  

Right now houses are cheap, money is cheap, and there are tons of assistance programs so we are likely to not see any major increase in home purchases as primary residences in the near term, and in fact if the market becomes tighter in terms of inventory, lending restrictions become tighter, or interest rates rise then most people would expect a decline in the number of home purchases as a primary residence. 

Very good information, and I love the concept of working with more 'institutional' type tenant organization reps.I had one quick comment about this that perked my attention regarding the discussion during the Fire Round, of making offers direct to banks vs. using a broker.