Anyway when the tenant moved out one dark and stormy night it ended up costing me a bundle!

Sometimes it’s underlying dark forces that keep good ideas from moving forward - I’m pondering the hotel industry reference - and often it’s just lethargy, lack of vision and flagging political with. 

You would need to bring 10-15% cash down for your skin-in-the game.  

Bottom line you ran into a fake lender who is just stringing you along to see how much money he or she can get out of you and then go dark.. move on .. find a real lender.. and I will bet the terms were great too right?.

You're taking some of the risk or have skin in the game by handling 50% of the expenses.4.

I even created my first LLC to start the fix and flip business, funding it with enough skin in the game, elsewhere hoping to use OPM rather than my own capital to fund these projects as it has been difficult finding a lender who is comfortable with loaning to me solely without an LLC.My goal has always been to match my W2 income and eventually double it and more so I can work as a hobby rather than relying on it to live.

The Fair Housing Act is what applies to privately owned property (with the exceptions Bruce listed above) and it forbids discrimination against prospective tenants because of their disability as well as race, religion, sex (including gender identity and sexual orientation), skin color, familial status, and national origin. 

That's the immediate variable I see coming for the market but the rest I'm in the dark about as far as trying to predict market conditions in the coming years.

Especially with most units requiring 3 different paints/colors: walls, ceiling and base/trim/doors.

I didn't do a great job of explaining the situation in my original post but added some color in a follow up post.