Once we missed the closing date, the seller wasn’t happy & demanded the EM of $10,0000 be released to him & put the house back on the market.We ended up with an extension only because we had been in a state of emergency and the lender had 8 more days to come thru & they failed us!

What percentages of businesses in that industry fail annully?

From what I read to many investors talking lease to own folks into these contracts without fully qualify them and then when the lessor fails you boot them out and keep their down payment.. 

Clearly, they failed in their primary responsibility to you as their layer of due diligence was a mere gossamer like patina.

If you fail to follow the rules, you may open your personal assets to a lawsuit.

For instance, in my private lending, I dont really give a numerical credit score much weight, but I absolutely look at the composition and history of the individual tradelines on a report if the borrower is a smaller outfit, such as a single member LLC or similar solopreneur-type operator.

And the fact that your post had at least three votes for it when I posted this shows that there are lots of other people who would probably be losing in PA under those same assumptions that just happen to be FALSE in Pennsylvania.Pennsylvania has some rather complicated rules when it comes to tax sales; the particular type of sale that the OP purchased at is one that does not divest any liens; it simply changes the party that is the owner, with the new owner taking title subject to all liens and encumbrances of record.With tax sales, the buyer must be aware of all the local rules under which the tax sale is being conducted, because the rules vary all over the place.Now, what the OP seems to have failed to do in his research was to cross index the recordings at the county recorder; the "missed" mortgage would have showed up on a search by parcel number if that sort of cross check was done (and assuming all indexed documents at the recorder are properly indexed of course - I have seen mistakes made attaching a document to the wrong parcel).

I would not characterize this as a scam per se.. but it appears to me to be a failed investment model..

But ultimately the responsibility lies in my hands.I jumped on a seesaw of risk hoping that the momentum would catapult my bank account into six figures only to find out the hard way that flipping houses isn’t as easy as I had predicted.This house was purchased for $64,000 with an expected rehab of $100k to $120k depending on how much work the dilapidated and neglected house needed.The midwest is lovely but the houses carry the weight of weather storms nearly a century old leading to more damage than a beginning investor could expect.The appraisal came in at $225k for my lender meaning our all-in cost would be around 85% of the sales price worst case.

So rather than overemphasizing WHICH market to chose, emphasize finding the right mentor/coach/team because it is possible to fail in a good investment market when you do not know what you are doing and to succeed in a more challenging market when you do know what you are doing.