-->Rental estimations for area are (conservatively): $2000 lower unit, $2600 upper unit.What about this doesn't work for you all, given our investment goal and strategy?

Also 3 days of red leg Partridge driven hunts. 

Living in an "appreciation market" (as opposed to "cash flow" market) is tough because 80% of the strategies talked about on BiggerPockets don't work well here, especially if you want to live in a half decent area.We looked at 2-family properties, but ended up buying a 2BD/2BA fixer-upper condo in an area that still allowed us to live life how we wanted. 

When buying a fixer-upper in Waco, what are the key factors you look for to ensure the property has strong profit potential?

I ended up getting lucky and finding this one on zillow.The biggest problem I'm seeing is that everyone in my area wants close to retail price for fixer uppers - and people are paying it.

You can buy a large upper/lower with two identical units in decent condition for about 350-450k.

I am confident if I were to have started taking action sooner I would have had many more deals under my belt but I was a knucklehead and was swinging hammers on my fixer-upper instead of hiring a contractor. 

I am also negotiating a "Subject to" property with one of my existing clients.If you can get legs on the PM company (get to 200 to 300 units quickly), you should be able to have enough cash flow to be able to fund your purchases.If I were to do anything over, I would have quit my engineering job sooner and started in property management.  

which is fine Iv done plenty of cash deals but always using my own money I haven’t ever borrowed someone’s money or had a hard money lender typically on deals that wore 100k-250k Iv also used conventional financing before for flips and so on But recently every house worth looking at in my area is around 400k-550k for a fixer upper.

Going to those places will help you stay in your budget and cash flow better too - with property management built in.The hard part with the smaller towns is that they don't always have the big property management setups so thats where you'd have to do some leg work to find ones that do.And you might be able to do bigger str towns or even cities in that price range.