Glad it's working for you I slowed down on RE for about the past year and a half S&P 500 is up 27% YTD, NASDAQ 100 up 32% 

In terms of distance I will be about half hour away so not bad at all.

I was going on vacation, so I arranged for my partner to give him half the second payment for supplies only. 

I recently added a half bathroom out of existing space in a very high cost market.  

LOLi have raised half a billion $ ($500 million) through syndication over the last 22 years.  

If it's not you - you are going to be paying contractors (most likely) retail repair rates - and with the prices of housing (even dilapidated housing) pretty high right now - I would say that flipping is not the easiest "in" to the market.  

I've found the easiest solution is to have a really strong banking relationship and then they will be able to provide non-standard offerings. 

At about half of my properties I provide quarterly exterior pest control services.

I'm a pretty big advocate for the south side of chicago where you can find properties half that value and cashflow really really well in turnkey condition. 

Consider this: there are an estimated 10K homes in Pacific Palisades, at least half of which were destroyed. 25% were constructed during the 60-70's and +/- 75 TOTAL were built in the past FIVE years.