No, owner financing is not just for people who can't get a mortgage

The myth I keep bumping into: owner financing is the last stop for buyers the bank already rejected. A credit-score pity deal. I think that's backwards. Plenty of people with solid income can't get a clean yes from a lender — self-employed folks with messy-looking tax returns, people who just moved, investors who already hold a stack of mortgages, buyers of houses a lender won't touch because the roof is tired. None of that means they can't pay. It means the underwriting box is narrow. And on the seller side, it's not desperation either. A seller who carries paper can stretch out the tax hit, turn a house into income, and often sell a quirky property that would sit forever on the conventional market. That's strategy, not charity. The real risk in these deals isn't the buyer's credit. It's the paperwork — who holds title, how it gets recorded, whether there's an underlying loan with a due-on-sale clause nobody read. Fix that with a real estate attorney and a title company, not with a credit report. So tell me where I'm wrong: have you seen owner-finance deals that really were last-resort buyers, or is that reputation outdated?