For a long term buy and hold, quantify how much cash flow and what ROI you want.

.#5 Practice, Practice, PracticeWalkthrough potential rehab properties (or find properties virtually online) and practice creating detailed scopes of work, quantifying repairs and estimating rehab costs for the projects.#6 Get Your First Rehab ProjectYou can practice all you want, but ultimately you will learn the most about estimating rehab costs by actually rehabbing a house.

How do you suggest to quantify this factor?

.#5 Practice, Practice, PracticeWalkthrough potential rehab properties (or find properties virtually online) and practice creating detailed scopes of work, quantifying repairs and estimating rehab costs for the projects.#6 Get Your First Rehab ProjectYou can practice all you want, but ultimately you will learn the most about estimating rehab costs by actually rehabbing a house.

People fail to ask the question or fail to quantify the answer. 

It is just hard to quantify the exact value of what we will bring our clients.

But you can't escape the value that comes from those non-quantifiable elements like experience, market knowledge, strength of your team, state of the market to ultimately determine Deal or No Deal. 

@Andrew Semler Start by clearly defining and quantifying your goals and criteria.

That lowers their cost more and they can probably quantify the risk of you refi-ing in years 2-7. 2) The now 9-10K maximum cost is a drop in the bucket of their total theoretical revenue they stand to make over the term of the loan through the interest payments.

Before doing anything, I strongly recommend you clearly identify your objectives and quantify them.