This is insane that these guys got that large of deposits on a pre sale rental house construction sent directly to them. 

I'm the VP of a roofing company in South Florida and work with a few good PM companies on a regular basis, a lot of bad ones too.There are good and bad PMs in each of those companies. 

If you don't care about income and are more of a capital gain kind of guy, prices are already high (as you noticed) and there's plenty of land available to buy so I'm not sure how much is left in the tank.

Most of the bad noise right now is about downtown skyscrapers and REIT or Syndication apartment complexes where they played short term versus long term interest rates wrong.  

If you just hire the cheapest or first PMC you speak with and it turns into a bad experience, please don’t assume ALL PMC’s are bad and start trashing PMC’s in general.

If you fully understand the process, the potential for profit can be considerable but if you do not, it can be bad - real bad.

I've done Crypto, stocks, businesses, ecommerce, trading bots, ponzi schemes etc. Curious what else is out there

Many people don't listen to others who know and are just so excited to invest they jump on bad numbers.

What do you guys think about this strategy of opening up a HELOC in hopes of freeing up some of my other capital.  

Open ended contracts, particularly verbal ones, usually end badly.