If not, how much are you all "throwing away" on rent when those funds could be applied to ownership?

Following the shiny object, throwing money at a market you don't know well, and blindly trusting strangers that have a clear profit motive put you in a poor position to succeed regardless of where you choose to invest.

Don't ever hesitate to throw out a question or scenario you have in your head.

Just because someone throws the words tokenization or crypto onto something means nothing to me, doesn't make it anything special because of what form the currency is. 

If you wait 5 months and rents are $2,000 it would be like throwing away $10,000, plus all of the expenses every month.

Close your eyes and throw darts at one.

I would also throw in bandwidth.  

Our minimum per deal is currently 200k but fixing to go to 300k due to investment demand.I have been looking at lots of new offerings from multifamily syndicators and they throw big flyer saying all these returns and then you look into the pitch deck and it makes no sense to me.

I saw someone post in a group who I think is a schmuck brag about hitting a specific figure for their training and I just shook my head - like wow - this person is a great sales person and just steals the same lines from the business book about working hard and throwing out some slick slogans - but man oh man - when real estate gets hard people move to being a guru - just look at FB ads right now - many are not funds anymore but how to raise money, how to do X.

As lenders, well issue a prequal/preapproval letter if we've analyzed your income, assets (bank and brokerage statements to establish that you have the liquidity to afford the down payment, closing costs, and reserves), review credit of the guarantors, review the relevant experience to ensure that we're not throwing our money away on newbies that are wandering around in the dark, and have put together a reasonable plan of attack for the project.