While doing that, try out their customer service and see who is friendly and knowledgeable about their product, and who answers the phone.  

I feel like a lot of these "cash" transactions are a product of homeowners sitting on record equity.

There's a variety of ways to get a deal in front of you (I'm mostly a flipper), but basically if it looks promising, I run custom comps queries and check the current & past $/sf of renovated/distressed product in that city or zipcode.Here's a chart on 90066 I generated from my tool under Market Stats > Sales Data > Specific Zip Code:- My above chart (more available) shows the Avg Renovated $/sf (High) over time in this Zip Code, something completely different than charts/providers based on Averages/Medians only, like every other platform (RedFin Below, https://www.redfin.com/news/data-center/):- Can't select smaller locations such as City or Zipcode for their $/sf data, so it's useless helping me underwrite/verify a deal.- Can set Zip Code for Median Sale Price data, but again it's the median/avg so it's useless helping me underwrite/verify a deal.Then if that looks decent, I'll run Sales Comps, and get a quick summary of some key metrics based on those comps.

from spending my last 10 weeks in miami looking at 500 land deals and making offers and doing underwriting on deals with construction values higher, the playing field above 10 million is so much easier and better and of more interest and separates all the newbies from sophisticated. at my level there is no reason to do small deals. the only multifamily I do under commercial at this point is a triplex we build over and over for out of state investors in Columbus Ohio which is just a unique little niche. tampa I'm not too familiar with zoning or rezoning but columbus is such an old city it has so many mutilfamily properties and rezoning is very easy to get the entitlements for ground up new construction.

This is not to say you can expect an Agent to catch everything and we are by no means inspectors or contractors, but anyone helping you purchase a rental property should have a basic understanding of rental standards to put out a good product that will attract a good tenant. - Lastly, if you are looking at real estate as a long term buy and hold strategy, you have to look beyond just cash flow.

If you're offering the same product as everyone else then you're left competing on price. 

Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com, etc), sophisticated rate management and paying all state and local hotel taxes.

@John Cardinale I meant that you can use a hard money lender that offers DSCR products, as traditional lenders do.

Love this thread, I'd offer that we are in Dallas and offer in person appointments too.Is there a structure or product that we could offer the market thats better ?

With more money, an investor can buy larger, multiple, or more productive propertiesDon't believe me - take a look at this comparison chart:Let’s say you do 10 transactions in your investing career.