While both involve finding and properly securing a site and bringing it to full entitlement, the ground-up process includes the land piece but gets way more involved and complex to execute.The full "Monty" for ground-up development needs to include financial literacy, an explanation of metrics, and how they work.

Get your basic estate docs in place before building a complex entity structure.  

It really depends on what you are looking and I think your thought process is correct.

This sounds complex, and if the conclusion you're coming to is mortgage fraud, I would not recommend it. 

The owners of 100+ unit complexes are not individuals who will be swayed to sell by a good offer or the need to cut short term losses.

The process was seamless.

Even something as simple as utilizing ChatGPT to speed up certain processes such as asking for generalized information on a market's demographics and immigration patterns can be useful and save a lot of time.

Yet, when I initiated a withdrawal, I was met with a complex set of terms, penalties, and withholding conditions that were never clearly explained beforehand.

Or maybe even an apartment complex 20-50 units 

@Eli Jerman Owning a duplex where you live in one unit and rent out the other offers significant tax benefits but adds complexity.