They are rightly afraid that someone who buys an apartment building for the first time, won't know what they are doing and the cash flow will suffer.

They may let a seller suffer less who carried back a second.Assuming there is an agreement for the second to cut the debt, restructuring it later, dealing fraudulently with a lender to influence them in taking a loss won't be something you want to do.

He did point out some potential disadvantages of purchasing RE through this account--no mortgage interest write off, no depreciation, higher interest rates, larger down payment--that of course I wouldn't suffer if I bought properties in my own name (instead of the 401k account).That put a bit of a damper on the project, since it would be a lot easier for me to fund purchases with my IRA money (no limit on properties, no debt/income ratio issues, plenty of funds sitting around as someone who is 50 and has contributed regularly throughout the years).

I have dreams of one day making it back to Akron to live, but for now I will just have to suffer.

It has always been toxic, just for much of our history we've had bigger challenges and didn't live long enough as individuals to suffer the effects of radon.    

Using 96.5% leverage, most real estate investments will suffer negative cash flow.

This is pretty much why I wouldn't buy a mature company, I would buy the assets but the name and history of a mature company would need to be valuable, clean and auditable for me to consider it and suffer the brain damage.

Is correct-you can pull out your Roth IRA contributions tax free.I did that in the past, however, at current valuations my fear is that the market has way more to lose than it does to gain.Your savings for a down payment in the short term could potentially suffer.

If you are well capitalized you don't have an issue.The people on the investor end that are suffering are the ones with high risk tenants, that are not diversified and under capitalized.

We all have friends and family members who suffered significantly, it has been very sad to see this happen.