Stay dedicated and committed to your real estate investments, keeping your goals in mind and being open to learning and adjusting to market changes.Good luck!

In addition, many of those cheap OOS places have historical long term rent growth at or below the inflation rate meaning that cash flow is unlikely to increase significantly in inflation adjusted dollars.  

Verify everything independently or risk-adjust the purchase price (which may not result in acceptance).2) then I did tax returns for a season. 9 out of 10 people with rental properties had no records of their expenses and would just say, “put down $200 for that” etc.  

Sometimes, partial renovations can be significantly cheaper while still resolving the main issues.Rent Adjustment Considerations: If you decide not to raise the rent to cover the cost of repairs, communicate clearly with your tenants about the situation.

You can:Go to other markets, or;Find motivated sellers or;Adjust your financial criteria to reflect market forces (either directly or through using some value-add approach after purchase), or;Hold off expansion of your empire until the Gods (market forces) see things your way, or;Pack it in and play the stock market.BTW, drop the "two months" self-imposed deadline: You will wind up doing a deal for the sake of doing a deal, trying to convince yourself it is "good'" not because it actually is "good."

Competitive Strategy and Operations: How do you maintain operational competitiveness against larger chains like Wawa, especially in terms of pricing, service speed, and customer experience?

The math gets a bit more complicated to calculate the adjusted deduction but the minimum is $1050 (scaling up with earned income). 

I am sure there is a way to keep it and speed up the debt payoff piece! 

The remaining funds will help speed up the remodel.

The goal of real estate investing is financial freedom.Financial freedom requires a rental income that:Increases faster than inflation: Unless rents increase faster than inflation, your true (inflation-adjusted) income will continuously decline, and your time off the daily worker treadmill will be short.