I now see that there is quite a lot of information to digest before doing the deed.

@Mark HudsonState laws differ for co tracts, real estate, leases, etc., so my sending you the one used in Texas would or could do more harm then good.

Properties should be in the same tract, or you need to know how to adjust them for condition, age, view, upgrades, amenities, and 20 other things.You need sale date, value, upgrades... 

(Successful builders of tract homes didn't start there - they gained experience and ended up there.)If you have skills and a few good trades people, you can do well buying distressed, fixing, and retailing homes. 

Having nothing stand out as foreign has made the coursework easy to digest and remember. 

However, I believe you are on tract with Metro-LAX, personally I believe wherever they have those landing sites where LAX users unload passengers, it is a good area, and there are 8 of them.

A few days later after everyone had a chance to digest the numbers, they were calling the agent off the hook, to which he had to tell everyone it was already gone.

Land in the path of progress  carefully chosen Timber or AG tracts etc etc.. so there is many ways to slice the real estate orange up.. end of the day though the true measure is IRR not COC .. that is if your ever going to stop being a landlord..

What I'm doing is buying them with hard money, getting them repaired and rented, then refinancing them with my commercial portfolio lender once I have a small tract record of rents.

You might think a cosmetic-only repair 3/2 in a desirable neighborhood should cost $260k, while she's trying to show you that current prices are about $400k, and practically no price difference between sales prices of finest of 1980's mauve decor tract shack and the same house after a full HGTV rehab.