The client is in the early planning stages, hiring an architect now.

Then add staging, and now into marketing, how to pump it out there for maximum exposure, now we are paying all these sites to list and promote, burning a few hundred on FB ad's, a few hundred on this site, a few hundred on that site.

Then we paid him an additional $17,500 to complete the next stage of the project (plumbing, floors, etc) but that's when everything went south.

Prior comment of getting 15% in these investments - honestly I don’t see it because of the burden of the overhead to deal with small dollar investors.We started our fund At $500 and quickly bumped it up to now it’s $5,000 because of the costs of dealing with these small dollar investors was to excessive.

My wife and I are in the very early stages of real estate investing. 

Planning to BRRR and still in the beginning stages - will keep DSCRs in mind.  

We are currently in the final stages of an AI driven software that is going to essentially allow us to manage co-living properties effectively, without any of the staff or operations typically needed by rental properties.

The commission paid greatly outweighs having to go back on the market and potentially getting less than you listed it for the first time.Some individual markets are better for this than others, but if you have an agent with a great strategy on the list side (professional photos, staging advice, etc) and you pair that with listing the property at a low price; you increase your chances dramatically of getting a bidding war and not only offsetting the commission but potentially making more than originally planned. 

You also will not be able to see the house and no one should buy sight unseen without a history of doing it.If you are talking about Auction dot com or Xome or Hubzu, those come with a buyer's premium on top of the sale price between 5-10% and often have ghost bidders in the system so you will see it keep getting reset to hit a higher bottom.As a new(er) investor, auctions are where you go to lose money and take on excessive risk.

(And let the excess basis be depreciated over 27.5 or 39 years, as is typically done on real estate without a cost seg.)About @Sang Ji's question "can you do the cost segregation for the new apartment complex you buy through 1031 exchange".