I see former players from the 2000's coming back to the industry under different business names, and some of their prior work was less than stellar.

My understanding is very unlikely unless the deal is beyond stellar and you can provide strong financials and experience. 

Was this some kind of strategy for bumping the previous bidder or just frustrated frenzy over what could have been a stellar deal?

I have stellar credit and own my personal residence (valued approx $950k) free and clear, so it would be easy for me to get financing personally to purchase it and then transfer to LLC, but that sounds like that could be messy.

His resume, including being the youngest ever president of the National REIA when he ran BREIA, which I see he posted here, is stellar. 

You better make darn sure you have a stellar location with tons of demand to rent so that the rehab matches the rent growth to NOI with what jobs are paying in the area.

Not saying we haven’t have complicated guests or damage but we have stellar systems for managing that.

Then I sent him the real details of everything and he said I need to focus more on the Returns and a little less on the cash flow (which he also pointed out mine wasn’t stellar compared to doing other investments or even STR).

I manage about 100 STRs in the northern Utah region and after years of having really poor VAs, I decided to take the best of the best and form my own team which has grown exponentially now and we offer services to other hosts.This VA group is stellar.

I personally would not purchase more than an hour drive from me unless its a stellar deal.