I recommend working for someone while you sharpen your skills.

The problems with the project mostly stemmed from the crawl space work, which required shoring, replacing structural members, leveling floors and insulation. 

That can vary depending on the market and the level of service provided.Hope this helps!

Since there are often different entities, there are different skills and systems needed.With that said, I can tell you are definitely better at building systems that I am (I have built up some best practices, but they mostly reside in my head).

It is in a northern MI Downtown area (opp zone) in a county seat with 2 hospitals, had it re-zoned to mixed use, and is considered blighted which makes it eligible for MEDC funding of up to 50% of project cost.It is 8k sqft (4,000 each level) with the lower level being a walkout (top level is street level with sloped drive down to the rear of the building).

Sounds like the county failed on multiple levels including not giving proper notice, not sending notices to the correct address, etc. 

Calling the appraiser to see what you can do to push it up a "C-Level" would be smart before doing any reno also, might only need a few things to make it far more valuable in the eyes of the bank.I've heard of a tactic for figuring out demand, which is to put up a dummy or coming soon listing on facebook marketplace and see the amount of activity you get on it. 

If you want to fill your property with residents sourced from the companies above, imagine being the overworked, relatively low-level employee tasked with finding the appropriate housing ASAP.

As a self-managing landlord, I used to believe that almost everyone could learn the skill stack necessary to become a competent property manager.

Slowly build out a repeatable process...if you continue to change things (as in different types of properties, different levels of renovation, different finish material, different neighborhoods, etc.) you create more variables and make it harder to solve to the problem.I am a math guy and less unknowns/variables you have the easier the problem will be to solve.