I am working purely from my own funds so I feel like house hacking will be the way to go.

Also, not all incentives are purely financial.

This could be an LLC jointly owned by the contributors or a Joint Venture agreement, but you'll be thankful for this structuring 5-15 years from now.If you are using OPM to take down a property and you'll be cashing them out, then you don't need a structure like this necessarily -- a promissory note and related instruments can be used and then once the cash-out happens they are paid off and released and you own it pure and simply.

@Ruben S Paul buying land in this area, like @Will Fraser mentioned would be purely speculative.

Everywhere else you're gonna find it hard to justify the purchase if you're banking on appreciation and not pure cash flow.

So out of pure embarrassment I started to learn what it meant to run a real estate business.These thing are the best things I learned. 1) I'm doing this to improve my life and the lives of others2) These people are my clients not my family or my friends3) If I don't quit loosing money get out and leave it to others.4) This is way too easy to be hard.My first situation was rent collection. driving hours every month to collect rent, sometime 2 and 3 times just to find no one home.

I have been in a bit of a rut since I lost one of my previous deals and reading your story helped to recharge my batteries. 

The only thing I could figure might have happened is that the syndicator's purchase of the 70-80% of the units would have been based purely on cap rate, as a commercial deal, and rents seem to have appreciated pretty well at the complex in the last 5 years (25% by one metric) while market forces in general and rates for borrowing capital, in particular, seem to have driven cap rates considerably lower / prices higher, from what I gather (although, I'm not a syndicator currently, on either the GP or LP side, so I really don't know what I'm talking about in this regard).  

This is pure opinion here, and not gospel truth by any means. 

I think (purely my opinion) that older folks (40+) use VRBO and millenials use AIR.....that seems to be the case for us anyway...