Hawaii is a market for sophisticated investors who aren't dependent on cash flow.  

Brad provided the training to become sophisticated and the network to meet more GP than I could imagine. 

So, thats a fair amount of equity that you are pricing yourself out of due to not wanting to pay ~6% of your gain (federally anyway).Probably not as sophisticated as the Deferred Sales Trust, but an installment sale would spreadout the liabiilyt and maybe you could be federally taxed at 15% instead of 20%, thus saving 5%. 

Worth area I can safely say your perception of Texas is skewed. 

This is no different than the stock brokers that were selling "just buy tech" in the late 90's or the real estate "experts" that were telling people "the sophisticated people are buying on interest only, ballon payment, loans, then selling before the balloon is due" in the late 2000's.

You would have to take $120K minus operating expenses before dividing by $1M.Seems like you need a more sophisticated spreadsheet to analyze properties.  

ITS very hard to do this stuff .. sophisticated sellers or any seller that talks to an attorney is going to have a hard time giving you title to their property but they remain on the loan.. thats your biggest hurdle.Hey Jay, that makes sense if you plan on flipping but you can go higher on price if you are going to hold it for some time as a long, mid, or short term rental.

Much more sophisticated than many I have seen (I have never seen Brock's), but user friendly enough to not be overwhelming.  

As I navigate through this decision-making process, a question has surfaced: Is my perception correct in thinking that California leans more towards appreciation-heavy investments rather than prioritizing cash flow?

Deals that actually create $1M in gain are not called 'mill' by anyone half sophisticated enough to have this problem.