@Nathan Frost  Ironically, I did the majority of my real estate investing in Texas while living in Metro Detroit, and you are doing somewhat the reverse.I didn't want to get too negative, but suffice to say the City of Detroit* is a very tough market. 

Plan was to do self storage; then found out the creek that sits a ways back flooded 5 years ago, not in a floodzone but all the locals know so self storage is a tough sell at this point. 

Land is very tough to estimate value do to it's valie is based on what you can do with it and how much demand there is for what ever is ultimately done with it. 

i agree with you on the tough environment there for purchasing / house hacking but I wouldn't give up on that regardless of what else you look into. house hacking = owning real estatewildly successful arbitrage = not owning any real estatecan you look in Frederick MD or Fredericksburg or Ashburn or an exurb? 

Recently Clint made a post about the land market has been tough & how he felt burn out from teaching things that don’t work like they used to.

It is tough to crack, but it has so much potential. 

Any way good luck with it.. sounds like this company's eyes were way bigger than their stomach.. to scale on scattered lots is pretty tough logistically and I guess we are seeing that play out.

Another issue I see with older homes is the layout and functionality is tough to manipulate even during a full gut.

Tough to stay disciplined as "Past performance is no guarantee of future results". 

It's always a tough call on whether to just do a day trip or pay for a rental as the costs of a nice rental can add up quickly.The TL/DR (which I'll expand on) is that we ended up changing to a strategy of letting others help pay for a cabin that we know we'll love.