Should i be asking for lower tham 550k to have a greater built in under market cushion?

I move here from SF with hopes that my "nest egg" will allow me to get into REI, nabbing an easy, relatively inexpensive property that only requires cosmetic touch ups that can be completed in under 14 days and less than $20k.

In terms of equity we nearly doubled in under 6 years of owning....  

Any deal worth flipping or BRRRing is going to sell in under an hour.

Our Kansas City market is inundated with traditional wholesalers that have muddied the water.

Doing all of that in under a year?

When I decided to make this a business and treated as such, I went from cash flowing maybe $30k/yr to over $130k/yr in under 18 months.

Got a couple questions about the rehab portion on the HUD in a delayed financing scenario and how it would affect the subsequent cash-out refi that hopefully y’all can help me understand:1) does the work have to be performed by a contractor (similar to how an FHA 203k loan requires this) or can you do it yourself,2) does the scope of work have to be line-item’ed or is it just a bulk amount for the whole shebang,3) in the event that the sun, stars and the moon all aligned and Mercury just happens to be in retrograde in the rehab actually came in under budget (say, $30k put on the HUD for the rehab and it came in at $25k all said and done), is the excess amount returned or just what happens in that scenario?

We are in strange times so landlords have the upper hand but if the market has a correction and people can't get loans the rental market will be inundated with flippers, builders all become accidental landlords.

I've had problems like this before, typically it's been my fault for not properly vetting tenants (had some bad eggs come in under subleases when I wasn't paying attention) or for being over-eager to get a tenant into a property (saved a month of rent on the front end but ended up losing it on the backend).