Any specific neighborhoods you recommend looking into—or areas to avoid?

Any tax pro who is familiar with REI will be able to help you.

Honest... not great but we had other tax reasons to get into them.   

If you were able to increase the value of the property significantly after the rehab, then you could bring the deal to a community bank  to refinance and take the hard money lender out.You keep all the equity and don’t have to file a partnership return for your annual tax return, which can be costly.  

I haven’t gotten bids yet (build is too far away), but I’m hoping to keep it under $300K by subbing out the work myself.I’m not a huge Dave Ramsey fan, but I do lean toward being conservative and avoiding too much debt.

The sellers you are dealing with in these situations don't deal with prorating Taxes, or any other kind of prorations, that is what an escrow agent does. 

There are two reasons this is a bad idea.Investing with an SDIRA (assuming it is not a Roth) will often result in paying significantly more taxes. 

The same thing you claim on your tax return for your properties.

There are less taxes in Alberta too.

Note that I live in the Netherlands, which has many tax laws.thank you