I found out later that this city requires the buyer (both me and the person I sell it to) to put up a $10,000 bond with the city until the repairs are made.

This clause is, I believe, one of those phantom clauses utilized to strike fear in the hearts of investors and buyers but has no real teeth.

I look at it like this, if you have that much room in it and this is our first set of negotiations, it’s probably not going to be a good fit.What I’ve started doing in my company now is hire two project managers who handle between five and seven projects each instead of trying to get a general contractor to run the jobs.Effectively the project managers act as a general contractor, they call 3-5 companies/people from each trade to come bid on the job.We like to have all the contractors show up at the same time so that they know there is competition.Typically we call five people and only three show up, we then tell the three that are there that we need their bid within 24 hours and from there we will usually only get one or two.The point is that this is qualifying the contractor as to whether or not they are somebody that can work with us or not.If they don’t show up or don’t deliver the bid in time that is an early enough warning sign for me to say they are not going to perform the way I need them to when it comes to time frames and budgets.It is a lot of legwork and a lot of phone calls but once you get the system down and some relationships built you won’t have to go through it for every trade.Licenses, insurance, being bonded and partial and full lien waivers are a must and we have found that this method actually works a lot better than using a GC because effectively all of the trades are self managed.The electrician goes in, does his rough, takes his partial payment, signs the lien waiver and comes back later to do the finish and trim work and get a final payment.He is not trying to do the electric then go hang some drywall, build a deck and replace the roof on your property.I’m not saying that every GC is like that however in my marketplace it is very common that the general contractor will use the license of a friend or coworker for a specific trade like plumbing or electric and then pay one of his guys $12.00 or $15.00 per hour to do the work.Theoretically he is making more money that way but in reality the entire job is slowed down drastically because you have an experienced “generalist” worker performing work that should be done by the licensed professionals.Best of luck to you.

When they are arrested, they have to post bond and it goes to the mom. 

As a principal, you can make a lot of money with the right model, but it takes a lot of cash to build your own book and remember, you'll be asking lenders and investors to borrow their money to collect on accounts that they consider the bottom of the barrel and very risky.Get some underwriting / risk experience where you can (you can cut your teeth in sub-prime automotive paper) and I think the future is the RMLO to residential and commercial real estate loans.Good luck!

@Steven Bond  I looked at your website briefly.

I'm using old bond interest for my CapEx budget.

MH notes are JUNK paper junk bonds sub prime all rolled into one.  

Elliot,Bidding wars are a tough place to cut your teeth on a first deal. 

Even James Bond had a handler)