Trying to pretend you now know what Dobb Frank is will do you no good until you have an understanding of what it is you are working with.  

That is complete bogus.The best answer simply is, "pretend you are end buyer", and then mind all the costs an end buyer has, then then add your fee to that cost.The challenge here is you need to evaluate if the property is a good flip, or if it is better for buy and hold.If it is a flip, yes figure out holding cost, cost of money insurance lending cost closing cost holding cost, "Ohh crap this didn't just happen" costs, utilities, repairs, cleaning marketing costs.If it is a buy and hold, a ton of these costs will not be present and some will be lower, so your wholesale price differs depending on the property being a flip property or a B&H property.The 70% rule is crap because the 70% rule doesnt account for the house being in a war zone, busy street, near an awesome school, and no the ARV doesn't take care of this.

Usually collected as part of the application process.Fraud: let’s not pretend it doesn’t happen.

When someone insinuates that the market could be softening, why does many  operators  go out of their way to go into denial and pretend like they’re doing great?

Pretend you're buying a property.

Those appraisers love to kill sales.Here's some sound advice that will prevent you (and anyone else reading this) from buying a new car/furniture/vacation with your pretend profits before close of escrow; The deal ain't done until the check clears the bank.

Pretend you just bought them and you have 60 day deadline with a punch list to get done. one For maintenance and one for the tenants, decide who stays and who's out the door. 

My biggest issue with that is I do not want liquid cash with inflation pretending to be a hot air balloon. 

I feel there are a lot of qualified people on here who have more experience and I don't want to come off as a pretender.

If equity is pretend wealth, which I believe is your opinion, the moment my purchase loan closes with my down payment I just transferred that money from real to imaginary.