Even Donald Trump, with a starting grubstake of $58,000,000.00 and a billionaire father consignor ( of loans "only" up to $100,000,000.00), and working in his father's real estate business since the age of eleven (collecting the coins from the laundry rooms in his fathers apartment houses, where I first met him), saw the need for a quality education and attended and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business with a Bachelor of Business degree with a major in Real Estate.So the point is that education and experience are the necessary ingredients for a successful career in real estate investing.  

Any missing ingredients?  

No, I will not share my secret ingredient.  

While nothing is perfect, our models have undergone 34 years of improvement and refinement, so we’re pretty confident that they’re reliable.So yes, Excel is the essential ingredient, but I would submit that there is indeed a difference between a basic Excel spreadsheet and an Excel-based program like ours.

What @Chris Martin said.A real estate/closing attorney, a promissory note and a deed of trust are the primary (sometimes only) ingredients needed or required to close on a property using private or hard money in this state.The going rate around here for a RE attorney to draft or review these docs and close a loan is anywhere from around $400 to upwards of $1,000 depending on who you know, how much business you throw their way, or the direction of the wind that day.The cleanest way to do it, if you're interested in that sort of thing, is for the PML to have their own RE attorney draft the lender docs (Note, DOT, some want a personal guaranty as well) and then use a different RE attorney to close the transaction with.

What are the key ingredients for this letter?  

These are all key ingredients to success.

Was it the location, rents too high for business model, bad operator, bad ingredients and menu, or a combination?

The key ingredient to long distance management is having a team locally with 3 backups minimum.

As time goes on and trust is reaffirmed, you might change things a bit.Another absolutely critical ingredient is communication.