What is your most creative financing deal?

[Kyle Wenger]

I am looking to learn creative ways to fund deals. I have a few questions: - What has been your most creative use of financing to fund a deal? How did you do it, why did you do it that way, and what was the end result? - If you have used private money lending to fund deals, how did you find them? When you did find them, how are you structuring it with them?

[Gordon Forbes]

My very first deal was creative. Found a fixer whereby the owner had recently inherited it and lived elsewhere. The house had gone into escrow numerous times and had always failed inspection, it needed a lot of work with "hidden" problems so it showed OK but had lots of rot. So I told the seller that there was only two people who would buy his house; someone with a bulldozer or me! My offer to him was 10% down, owner carry, low interest and no payments until I flipped it. He accepted and since I had no money, no credit, no job, I was only able to make it work by borrowing the down payment and renovation funds from a friend. Not that this is a reproducible scenario but creative financing can work if you are out there looking and thinking creatively.

I sold rhat first house creatively also. I had an auction! Advertised the auction with "best reasonable offer" so I had a minimum price I would accept. I only got low ball bids at the auction, so no sale. Then, as everyone was leaving a car races up and a guy says "Am I too late?" I showed him around and he offered a price that was 20% higher than the minimum I would have accepted just minutes before! You can't make this stuff up! It was a great way to start off on my first flip. Hope you have similar good luck. 

Unlike the old pre internet days, now just Google "hard money lenders in your town". Don't pay up front fees to some schmo to find you money, the loan broker (if there is one) gets paid only when a deal closes (they get paid out of escrow). One "good thing" about using expensive hard money; the deal has to be pretty darn good to absorb all the points and high interest rate of hard money. Mediocre deals won't pencil out and you don't want to waste your time on mediocre deals. Now that I've been doing this for a few decades I can buy for cash, but its therefore easy to waste time on mediocre deals thinking "I got to do a deal cause my monery is just sitting in the bank". Better to wait for a great deal. If you have to use hard money it will need to be a great deal!

Good luck, keep digging.