However, it appears his return could have been greater with more leverage (longer term loans, extracting money from property when it had significant equity to re-leverage, etc).  

Throughout this year I will begin posting as much as I can with any updates on my real estate journey with all of you and hopefully make some meaningful connections along the way. 

However if I do a BRRRR I can achieve infinite return by extracting all of my investment.

Which layers should we pay attention to, or combine with other layers, to really figure out meaningful information?  

Some town/city engineering departments may be receptive to a real estate investor, but you may need some fluff to convince others, even though this is all public record.If you are able to obtain the files, PM me and I would love to help guide you through how to extract the information that you want.

Do you guys know any tool that crawls the MLS or sites like Zillow/Trulia and extracts information from it to excel or some sort of document with everything summarized? 

Will be living here until I can extract my equity.

AirDNA can give you a head start or some basic ideas, but like others suggested, we always do our own data extraction. 

Doing so is considered "brokering a security" and requires one to be a broker/dealer registered with the SEC.The exception of course is if you actually are a GP, meaning you participate meaningfully in the partnership in terms of vetting the deals, doing due diligence, helping with managing the asset.

To that end, we have made it a top priority to at least TRY to engage with them on some more meaningful level.