I'm uncertain how this will affect home sales - if people overextended themselves on a mortgage and lose their $400k to $500k salary, they may need to sell.

(This literally asked monthly if not weekly.)Until you have more than 25-50 properties you can use Quicken.

I expect this will continue for a while.  

I want to get control of the properties, remodel and furnish, while protecting this investment.  

Hope this helps and best of luck! 

At this point I can't fathom spending close to $100k in repairs and potentially being right back where I started.

This house-hack will be a negative cash flow while I live in it, fix it up, etc. 

Of course it is very important to do proper due diligence on the investment and the operator.As far as self-directed IRA there are number of companies offering such service, this topic has been discussed here on the forum many times so you should search using this keyword and learn from those discussions.

What are the ways to secure remaining money for this deal.

If you're new to this, have them explain the whole process of how they would get each job done.