But family first..http://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/521/topics/114766-east-bay-meetup---wed-2-16-14-in-oaklandZack, you may want to download the redfin app if you haven't already and take a look at what it's missing.

We are recovering from depleted savings and saving for a wedding, so we are looking for lower cost, high ROI modifications.

The things that help you stand out are (in no order and not just these items) Location, amenities of the community, size of the community (can it handle the traffic), reputation of community, how well the house is themed (or can be by you).You need to be in a highly amenitized communtiy like Championsgate, Windsor Island, Soterra and several others.

Looking to do a few deals, but trying to preserve capital at the moment (wedding in a few months, purchasing new house, etc.).

I love gray but all of the condos at my beach are all beach themed.

And you can use it to buy another investment property, pay for your daughter's wedding, or buy a mid-life crisis toy.

Wordpress on Linode for $5/month with the STR theme you choose.

Great post 1000% agree with everything that you discussed.I have also made posts with similar theme (ie.

Cashflow was great except in the beginning where I had a small negative Cashflow for about 2 years.Anyway, it's a long story and I'll leave it up to the readers.The theme here is to really understand the Math about what you are doing.

Find or pay to have a theme built (hope it converts visitors into leads well... most don't)Get hosting (most use really low grade sub $10/mo shared hosting)Come up w/ the proper content strategy (most don't have the experience to structure the content correctly to perform well or be a benefit for SEO)Write that contentAdd a bunch of plugins (which often times increase chance of vulnerability by hackers or slow things down... but all require the site owner to maintain the plugins)Dial the site in on mobile (most WP themes don't perform well converting visitors to leads on mobile, at any given time we're running 10-20 split tests across dozens of sites improving performance on our platform)Run split tests to continually increase performanceSetup your analytics correctly (we make it easy or use our built in analytics)Continue to update themes, plugins, WP (which isn't hard, it's very easy as you know... but many people don't want to do that)Keep up on the SEO trends / market trends (which we help our clients stay ahead of)etc. etc. etc.  100% anyone can use free or cheap tools to rank well in Google and in the case of a WP site... the simple fact of it being WP doesn't contribute to it ranking well at all.