From my experience in taking numerous classes online in college and in the classroom.

From closing to tenants moving in takes about 1 year. 

Since I've been on the tenant side of things quite a bit, I'm pretty grateful when I find a private landlord who has a reasonable pet policy (refundable pet deposit and no additional fees/pet rent), and I'm vested in taking care of the property and nurturing that relationship.

If he doesn't execute then I'm going to close on it with even better numbers. i'd be interested in taking a look at this deal 

Interested in taking action & building up the portfolio of in-state properties. 

Lots to unpack here, but in short, you aren't alone in taking on the strategy of house hacking with a STR/MTR, I personally do it out here (In Arvada), and have another rental that I do it as well, plus its a popular strategy amongst our clients.

What a great post and lesson in taking action and figuring it out along the way...particularly, in the face of high construction costs (although your pricing is good), high interest rates, and a recession, the magnitude of which is TBD. 

Whereas for your personal residence, I think there's a lot of virtue in "taking action" and getting past the "first property hurdle", since you have to live somewhere anyway.

So before I got under way with this deal I was seeing if there is anything I should look out for or defiantly engage in taking the owner financed route.

Let's look at the list of suggestions just in this thread on how to prevent such a situation from occurring:googleing the person's namehaving tenant sign a form stating the apartment is in habitable conditions before/upon moving intaking pictures/video of the premises before the tenant moves innot purchasing a property that has an existing tenantdoing credit checks on tenants who are in a property to be purchasedetc...Can you imagine the expense that everyone is now having to go through, in time (which is monetizable, and could be spent on other things, including real estate business), setting up a system to store such pictures, mental aggravation, increased work to screen tenants, and so on, for the sake of the <1% of tenants who cause these issues?