I'm new and don't pretend to know everything but I've always had trouble with the hangups around a cap rate (maybe because I'm in an expensive market I'm prejudiced).

Contact them.Get to the auction early - park where you can see who is getting out of the auctioneer's car - sometimes they will bring a straw person to RUN THE BIDS - that is to get the audience excited and to bid - often times there are no bidders and the straw person trys to get the audience excited about bidding.If the auctioneer or their associate is on the phone during the auction - sometimes they pretend to have a bidder - you have a right to ask who they are and if they are qualified to bid - probably not!

When I contacted them (pretending to be a prospective tenant) they went through this whole spiel trying to collect sensitive information.

You have a lot of pretenders out there wanting you to buy their book and pay for coaching sessions when all I need is someone to just spend one day with out in the field.

Don't lie and pretend like you are helping them. 

Then, pretend you are a bank, load the property with 5% vacancy, 5% mgt, 5% reserves and 5% other on top of current expenses and see if it'll make debt service.

At first his family pretended that they would pay for the damages and would work with me. 

He could pretend to be another random person checking out the house, but I think buyers don't want to offend, so they don't give honest feedback to the seller.

,Electrical inspection comes later ... the rough-in inspection is separate ... around here, at least.I think it is time you stop pretending that you know what you are talking about, you don't! 

So there's about your max home value you can work in and no more than a max budget of about 200k for loan amount.Let's pretend now that we did not refi but we sold it for 290k.