A successful investor's time may be worth hundreds of dollars per hour.

Contact wholesalers and maybe do some digging of your own via driving for dollars. 

.: How could you afford a $3k plus rental and making an issue of an extra hundred dollars? 

We are not at the stage yet where you should spend tens of thousands of dollars on an attorney filing a lawsuit or requesting arbitration.

I'm not sure of the exact dollar amount, but I believe if the grantee quick claims the deed for under that amount you avoid the transfer tax.

., etc. for example finding cash flowing investment properties which meet your ROI goal of 9% is NOT HARD heck almost every state (and likely every state) has a market which will achieve that but what does 9% mean without a dollar value if 9% is = to $200 or more okay that’s okay but if 9% means $25/mo. or alternatively if 50% ROI means $25/mo. doesn’t really matter much since although labor differs from area to area it doesn’t differ that much and also doesn’t really leave much room for error — so your minimum accepted ROI should also be couple within a minimum accepted $$ value (cash flow) and other minimums as well (i.e. min. equity, property types, property classes, etc.)Lastly as I mentioned achieving a 9% ROI is not hard and is achievable in every state; the HARDER part is to 1) achieve that AND 2) achieve 10-20% min.equity on the buy in or ARV AND 3) meeting your min. $ value AND 4) buying in a good/stable neighborhood/market AND 5) buying with some type of upside AND 6) etc. etc. etc. —- Again I’m not saying you have to do these things; it all depends what type of investor you are and what you are looking for however it is important to understand that if you shift the responsibility of either identifying the invest property or managing or any other aspect there WILL be a trade off — in this case the turnkey company has delivered on your goal of 8-9% ROI (projected... so TBC) and in return you have traded some of the other benefits of investing in RE for the convenience of not having to do much more than to look over the properties they have sent you and funding it from the comfort of your home, office, etc. ... again if this is the goal then you are on point but if the goal is to also partake in ALL of the other benefits of RE then you should understand that and not be surprised that it’s not a ‘stellar’ investment that checks all the boxes.

You wouldn’t magically have access to hundreds of thousands of more dollars if your credit score was 20 points higher  TLDR: You aren’t being harmed at all by being 780 instead of 800+.

Does it make sense to cheap out over the few thousand dollars it will cost to go through a proper escrow and title process?

So if I bought one for $7,500, and it probably needs a few thousand dollars of work (more than 1, less than 10).

Obviously it's a start but I don't think I can cash flow more than a few hundred dollars per property with zero down so what do I do next to keep growing my portfolio?