Focus on absentee owners and start with the ones who live the farthest away and only own one property in the area since they have the least use for the property.You can also drive for dollars, looking for anomalies of disrepair and then look them up in the tax records and use a site like Spokeo to do cheap skip tracing.

But, the self-sufficiency test for FHA loans can be really difficult in SF, meaning that the market rent from units you will not occupy must be sufficient to pay for the mortgage payment. 

It's even worse for landlords "The company is also asking for rate hikes of 38% for rental dwellings and 15% for tenants, with the rates taking effect May 1."

Any tips or tools for evaluating the local market would be greatly appreciated.

I noticed some of the reviewers mentioned how the area is up and coming so if the area is questionable that might be contributing to this.

I am trusting you have it set up with a service. 

All the best!

But let’s go a later deeper - my down payment would come out of a well performing stock portfolio.

I think you bring up a good point of considering offering higher returns to investors if I have to begin to search outside of my network.But my original question from the post still remains, where would you recommend I search for people interested in an opportunity like this? 

The group is on a small summer holiday now, but I’ll arrange some meetups in the beginning of September!