.- Working a W2 as a firefighter, posting and consuming content- Leaving my W2 to dive deep into real estate investing and working as an agent... and still watching/posting content all while business was ok - Deleting social media apps (one have one on my phone that I use 10 minutes or less a day), diving deep into building my business and skills which have drastically increased due to pure focus and increasing my business significantly- moral of the story... focus on the things you need to do in business (dollar productive activities) and life experiences while reducing consumption will increase your success  

We had to move fast and initially decided to sell it, the relator who was helping us somehow convinced us we should make it a rental property......... and let her be our tenant (insert face palm here) so since we had no real estate experience and we were already moved away, we agreed.

Curious about your experiences with the market, occupancy rates, and overall returns.

There's a lot of pitfalls there that you're probably not going to be aware of without experience. 

I say this from experience. 

I have no experience in those countries but I do in South Africa with there VAT. 

My experience was mostly doing SFH/Duplex/Triplex etc. and had experience in larger multifam. 

In my experience, you can absolutely use hard money in bank owned reo auctions...you still don't generally get access and thus need a lender who does need an appraisal in this scenario. 

Is anyone investing in texas (in long-term rentals) that knows about this and has experience with this?

I have no experience with this group but just visited their website.