The question will be how much capital do you have as stated before.If you only have say 40k or 60k then you buy 3 properties and you are out of money.Yes you can use hard money for flips endlessly but the costs are high.During many areas this is the best down cycle in some people's life times.

If the buyer is getting a loan, you won't have an agent to protect yoiu from the endless barrage of requests and documents.

@Jason Miller - makes sensemore recently i've come to appreciate truly passive options like private lending, note investing, LP in syndications, etc... as a compliment to ownership, since you can (theoretically) endlessly scale your time.

A big part of the issues I am facing are the contractor and myself are not familiar with all the procedures involved and somewhat unclear at times and the paperwork is endless.   

Good to see that others are bothered by endless voice mail and message trees.

But now time is important also and financing isn't endless...Sounds like you have many options but some uncertainty with the plumbing system. 

Hi everyone,This is my first post, but I have been reading endlessly on the site for many months.

You can mitigate this and be different (instead of the endless stream of newbies who come on BP, post once and then disappear) by educating yourself ahead of time, maybe doing a deal on your own etc.I have been doing this for 3 years.

I, a newbie, am tired of the endless cycle of real estate seminars (that just try to sell you more real estate seminars). 

Otherwise you're going to be endlessly explaining why it's like that to lenders, and it's going to close a lot of doors to you.