Although it also seems like with on-market deals are usually priced the highest and makes thin margins to work with.

Not even sure where you are pulling 30% from...Taking money from a traditional retirement account(non-Roth) now or later is subject to income tax at your marginal income tax bracket.Any 'planning' around distributions that you can do later can also be done now.If you want to take money out in a year where you are in a lower tax bracket(result of going back to school, taking a year off from work to travel, a year where you have a lot of losses from real estate via Real Estate Professional Status, etc).Also, hard to say what your income / tax rates will be when you retire.

The transaction costs of buying and selling a home (particularly the sell side) really eats into the margins.

Again some of it is very nice and is a marginally lesser extension of Fed Hill. 

You and a lot of other people that bought on tight margins with a low adjustable interest rate are in the same boat right now.

With today's slim margins, bypassing these middlemen might just mean working with a reliable real estate broker instead.Everyone starts somewhere!

Every submarket/micromarket is so unique, it's hard to know what your's can support when it comes to retail, and what it would be like to deal with those types of tenants, especially small business owners who may operate on a razor thin margin, like most food/coffee businesses do. 

While depreciation unrecapture is annoyingly tricky to calc, fed doesn't tax you more than your marginal rate.Do you have any other capital losses to tax loss harvest?

So with a SBL, typically you are able to take about 50-90% of your marginable securities.

So the people who just bought expensive properties panicked and lowered their prices and they are competing with people that have owned their properties for years and have higher profit margins.