It is in a 55+ community so my concern is that I would only be able to choose tenants from certain demographic.

Quote from @Luis Maza: Hi all, returning to the game this year and would like to pick your brain a bit, we started working with a wholesaler that will send us properties here and there with the "wholesale" price, but every time we check the properties and add the numbers, the margins are, well, I am not sure, too low perhaps, maybe we are getting to picky, but this is my dilemma for example...Today we got a property, wholesale price 300K, rehab about 50-60K, ARV is about 440k, but with the cost of hard money, we have about 100k cash, hard money interest at 11%, keeping the property for 90 days while we finish the rehab, closing costs,  commissions, we ended with 30k profit before taxes, while it sounds appealing, adding up all expenses and cost we ended up expending 50K on rehab(labor/materials) and about 50-60K with cost of the loan, interest, commissions, etc, everyone makes money, happy with that, but it seems that we are working to produce a 100k for everyone else, while we make 20-30k if everything goes well...In my opinion, we are not really getting "wholesale" price, it seems that we either buying to expensive, rehabs are much more than we would like to spend and the cost of borrowing that money is too high...We came up with thoughts as: lets fund it ourselves with money from a close friend/partner that we will bring in, and that would save us 10-15k here and there, but still, is that the norm now?

I'd like to keep the house for long-term appreciation since it's in a good school district and has low crime.

Currently, a decent house in Waco ranges from the low to mid 200's.

You want to choose an agent that invests in the asset class you are seeking and utilize their network and connections which will save you months if not years of work.

They are often lazy and do not want to put the work in for choosing the right commercial property to own direct.

If a tenant chooses not to rent a place because the dishwasher is on the left instead of the right then you just dodged a headache of a tenant who would complain about everything. 

It's automatically MTR (by the month).The best strategy is to do MTR in the low season and STR in the high season.

@Jeremy HartwigYou are missing a lot of important data, such as median income of the area, rent comps in the area, what current values are.You are buying on actuals, but in many markets that have low supply and have a lot of demand, it makes it difficult buy based on actuals.

FHA loans with low down payments are ideal for this.In the meantime, focus on improving your credit score and maintaining a solid financial foundation.