In a nut shell, your old primary residence becomes a full-time rental property that is used 100% for rental.

The low hanging fruit is gone.

That's a MUCH tougher nut to crack.  

And yes, Mar Vista has proven to be pretty fruitful, but I can not take the credit.

==================================================================So, now I'm more open to other methods of cracking open this nut of real estate investing, and maybe that's what the universe is trying to pound into me!!!

There is one more category "events" that can be very fruitful and can occur in the low season.

It always drove us nuts when a tenant moved out of a single family & the cash flow was $0 or negative, even for a short period of time.  

It is nuts how when you retire and have assets that are more than the loan, they can still turn you down because of ratios.

My first job besides cutting yards etc. was when I was fourteen and I went over across the street from my subdivision to the local fruit market.

In my experience, larger companies are more constrained by their workforce than they are by their budgets, so the discount rates in these situations will often be the opportunity cost of not being able to do other projects because of lack of staff.Now, for smaller companies (and individual investors), the more common scenario is that the investor is borrowing money and has to decide whether the investment is fruitful given the cost of capital.