One of my biggest concerns is that people are constantly going to beat me to all the best deals. 

Some have even told us this arrangement will make us more motivated to find a tenant faster and a good that will pay on time!

But if you want faster appreciation, look at markets that have lots of job and population growth.

If I had a high interest rate and wasn't planning on buying more properties, I'd probably pay down my mortgage faster. 

LOL, Jon beat me to it, good post!

Even so we generated more cash-flow and built equity faster than any real estate investment we made, or even all of them together.

I like connecting with lenders local to the areas because they typically have a larger network in the market and sometimes they're able to process the deal faster as well. 

...but between deprecation and ordinary expenses I'll be at a massive loss each year. 

My clients that do this actually do quite well and by quite well i mean 250k NET a year or better. .. far better than your average wholesaler. that is competing with a hundred other wanna be wholesalers for those same beat up inner city homes :)

So you can of course cherry pick those and stay low risk, but then you're much less likely to hit your $120K/year since you can only do as many of those deals as come up and you successfully beat the competition out on.