When it is that street by street you're a couple bad lease ups in the neighborhood from your house ending up being on the 'bad' street.

Did they do a bad job?

My parents for burnt bad by the banks, that shaped my financial believe system growing up.Of course, you should not "feel" about money at all.

I've seen some super bad flips.

Overtime, rents started lagging and annual repair costs become $1500-2000.There are a lot of bad tenants on section 8.  

If you try to get in with some upside down project with thin margins you won't be able to do it.The midwest from Pittsburgh out through Ohio and into Indiana, you have markets in that belt that offer beginners with little capital and no experience a chance to play.That's fine and dandy but setting up a network full of Agents, Wholesalers, and GCs that aren't gonna over sell you, talk you into a bad project, or plain rip you off is the hard part.

We don’t know any PMCs to recommend in the area mentioned, but since selecting the wrong PMC is usually more harmful than selecting a bad tenant, you might want to read our series about “How to Screen a PMC Better than a Tenant”:https://www.biggerpockets.com/member-blogs/3094/91877-how-to-screen-a-pmc-better-than-a-tenant-part-1-services-and-processesWe recommend you get management contracts from several PMCs and compare the services they cover and, more importantly, what they each DO NOT cover.

If you just hire the cheapest or first PMC you speak with and it turns into a bad experience, please don’t assume ALL PMC’s are bad and start trashing PMC’s in general.

Competition sounds really bad.

You can make an election under IRC Section 469(c)(7)(A) to treat all your rental real estate interests as a single activity -- an election to aggregate them all.