There will always be negativity around us, and if we let fear win over rational thinking we would never have successful companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc. 

So far my POL investment (Tinley Park Sports Complex) has been performing as expected, but soon after doing that one (and a fix-and-flip on PeerStreet), it became clear that I would need a *lot* of capital to effecitvely diversify away the risk of any non-performing loans (it's not apples-to-apples, but this analysis from LendingRobot on diversification needed for P2P notes is helpful.)

You'll run across some bad apples, but it's been worth it to weed them out and build a relationship with the good ones.

But if you are trying to compare this with buying an investment property in your own name using 20% down conventional financing you are comparing apples and oranges.

I had hoped that since the mold was so bad, and the house was so strangely unique for this area without having apples to apples as comparables to ever be a good candidate for a flip, that even at $200K it would send any and all investors running, I guess I was wrong.

They NYTimes has a very good rent v buy calculator:http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy...One major flaw when analyzing rent v buy is you need to compare apples to apples.

Currently only available for iOS they are working on an Android release, I believe.

There are rotten apples everywhere, hence the need for due diligence.

@Joseph S. actually meant to say Apple Blossom, not Flowering Peach.  

I also paid for an app: DealCheck from the Apple Store!