Sure the million dollar suburbs are nice if you have that kind of money and are playing the larger appreciation game but dollar for dollar pound for pound when it comes down to rent to value ratio its difficult to find the same kind of cash on cash returns section 8 rental properties offer in Detroit.

Noone here can give you any legitimate response without knowing the answers to those three questions.If you paid 1.6 million and put down 25% and now owe 1.2 million and the duplex will be worth 2 million dollars when its complete, then you can easily get a hard money lender to lend you on the property. 

Everyone in the group were either business owners or serial entrepreneurs or had millions of dollars real estate.  

It sounds like also I should subscribe to dealmachine and start driving for dollars, start a marketing list for direct mail, phone numbers, etc. of about 500 properties to market to at least 6 times.

I’d rather dollar cost average and buy every year in good times a bad times.

For example let's say you have an older home with plaster walls, your contractor will replace them with drywall at a fraction of the cost but the insurance covers the cost to replace with plaster which could be thousands of dollars more.

Driving for dollars" is another way to find properties. 

You'll also find some clients that like to juice the commission on performance metrics, similar to what you posted, but that is also relatively rare as most owners feel if they're paying you north of $300,000, you should just try to get top dollar with strong terms.

https://www.har.com/content/department/mlsHouston Real Estate Highlights in September, 2024:-Single-family home sales increased 1.7 percent year-over-year;-Days on Market (DOM) for single-family homes went from 45 to 51 days;-Total property sales were down 3.3 percent with 8,228 units sold;-Total dollar volume was statistically flat at $3.3 billion;-The single-family median price was up 1.1 percent to $335,000;-The single-family average price edged up by 0.3 percent to $415,435; -Single-family home months of inventory registered a 4.4-months supply, up from 3.4 months last September.

The second year we started questioning where our cash flow was and eventually discovered they had been embezzling 10s of thousands of dollars from us during the 2 years we’d owned the properties.