Take everything with a grain of salt, especially if coming from the seller's side.

@Chirag Patel, take this with a grain of salt, as I ended up pulling out of the 2 new builds I have ever attempted doing:A: calling a builder is a good start, but in my very limited experience, they will eat all of your margin, leaving you with a property worth what you paid for it.B: you need that detailed plan, as finishes alone can add significantly to your budget.  

@Esther Thomas I don't have this situation so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I was wondering for your rental properties do you have your tenant's maintain the lawn in the summer and shovel snow/apply salt in winter? 

Provo, Orem, and Salt Lake have a "3 unrelated persons" max tenant limit per unit.

They chose to close up shop.Having worked at lenders, hearing complaints from folks like you, I can only say "seen it, done it", and if I was a lender seeing a guy with a good story, like "the numbers tell me I should net $1,000/month", take it with a grain of salt, but insist on maintaining your requirements, unless you're a billionaire and writing off $150 million is no big deal. 

As @Frank Jiang said, maybe a few employees working for the institutional players, working a hundred hours a week so they can have a nice salary and upper-middle-class lifestyle funded largely by debt and overspending, but actual people who actually salt away the wealth?

It doesn't get any better than that.I tell myself this all the time, and then I look at how much money we've managed to salt away in the last ten years legally doing it, and not working particularly hard at it, and just following a few simple rules like treating tenants in a buy-and-hold operation with simple dignities, keeping up our end of our contracts, differentiating our product...Jeff, show me anything else that's legal and pays off like a by-the-book mom and pop C-class buy-and-hold operation in a Rust Belt town like the 'Burgh, and I'll show you a gold mine in the ghetto. 

I'm located in Salt Lake City and have had my first and only rental property here for almost 2yr.

We are very interested in the Salt Lake City surrounding areas (where my husband & business partners are from.)