I think CL is outdated and the people are staying away after the Lifetime movie came out.

Myriad sad stories of hardship, life's unfairness and five move out date extensions after closing it was nasty, high drama and unsafe. 

If the house is outdated or ugly, buy w/ the FHA and then fix it up and have it re-appraised to show 20% equity in the home so you can drop the PMI.

If a property is simply outdated, never really touched on the inside, is that alone worth a flip?

( I understand that building a strip mall is a lot more involved and time consuming than buy existing one) Its good that you're aware of his motivations and incentives, but here you should really consider buying existing first, if the building looks old or outdated, consider investing cash into substantial renovation.

Clean up repeat and outdated listings.

The property is funky old place, it is not the best, but fine for now, I would need to start planning for some potential pricier repairs in next 5 years or so with some of the major parts of the house (foundation, electrical is surely outdated, would want to someday install better HVAC instead of the boiler and no A/C setup it has, possible plumbing issues, roof will need attention w/in 5-10 years, etc).

It's a lot easier to make money guruing tired, outdated methods than it is to find deals these days.

Haven't followed him in years but I wouldn't be surprised if he's outdated.  

I used it a long time ago, and it's very outdated compared to other tools...I currently use Podio since it's very flexible and cheap $24, however, it's very complicated to customize it to your business needs (plus you've to add other 3rd party softwares to manage your entire business which adds on around $70, so the total is $94)I recommend, Ready-Made CRMs if you're starting like investorfuse built on Podio with $199 or investorfuse their standalone CRM with $149 or CallText.com which is very cheap compared to others since it includes the phone system together with the CRM all with $99.My advice, don't waste your time in systems...get anyone of these and start learning the know-how of the business and generate leads which is the toughest but most important part of this business.Good luck