We will recover in total about 50% of our initial investment in this as we too were early to the table and elected to not reinvest. 

I feel like there's a lot of money I'm leaving on the table.

Me and my partner both bring things to the table that the others don't.

If any of those are missing, well you've only got a 2 legged table and it's going to be issues. 

The low income versus high cost of living is referred to locally as the sunshine tax. https://www.businessinsider.com/most-expensive-places-to-liv...https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sandiegocitycal...It is my view that the incomes cannot sustain the high cost of housing in San Diego but it has seemed this way to me for four decades and yet the RE prices keep increasing.  

@Dean Malka thanks for providing that table for rehab cost estimates for Pittsburgh, this is really useful! 

You could try reaching out to ask questions and maybe that would turn into a sort of mentorship type relationship if adding a partner is not on the table. 

Like you said in your post, "Buying and holding is a long term strategy...............focus on the end goal"The second reason for trying to get good deals is that if you can get a 10-20% built in equity off the bat, it has the advantage of:- taking a big part of the risk factor off the table- built in equity that can be utilized as required- better cash flowThere are a lot of people on BPs that say that "money is made on the front end in RE".

No sure if the HML who was selling him the paper / and I dont know in your deal if you table funded that and they bought the loan 3 days later..

However, we typically use the FHA-203k loan because it involves a renovation, which I highly recommend if you are looking to really boost your equity and have the cost of the renovation wrapped into your loan with a VERY LOW AMOUNT OUT OF POCKET.I like the FHA loan, but honestly, the Fannie May Home Style is an even better product at this point because you just have to bring a bit more cash to the table 5% vs. 3.5% (w/ FHA), but you have a bit more flexibility.