Changes to local landlord/tenant laws and new situations involving tenants lead to these annual updates.

I'm in Milwaukee and I have heard of a lot of bad stories involving this type of scenario...mostly involving out of state investors. 

My advice to you is that syndications involve more layers of what I would call "Middle Management" - which takes money (profits you might call them) to fund.  

I taught myself Spanish, I already know the construction crews in the area, the realtors, the communities, the land, I have someone managing the property, I have a maintenance crew… I already did an incredible amount of the work involved in finding a deal and turning it around through reconstruction and proper management.

I never go off of a flat percentage on anything, I analyze the costs to get to a specific return I target and analyze the risk that is involved. 70% may be an initial metric to see if it is even worth pursuing, but every deal should be evaluated independently based on costs, time and risk involved.

You will need to find partners, you will need to travel to where you wish to invest, you will need to understand the ins and outs of the business by being actively involved and treating it like a business and not some super passive investment.If you don't want to do that work I suggest you just put that 200k into some sort of diversified mutual fund that can make you 10+% on your money without any of the work of real estate.At the end of the day this is just my advice and I'm only a stranger on the internet.

While both involve finding and properly securing a site and bringing it to full entitlement, the ground-up process includes the land piece but gets way more involved and complex to execute.The full "Monty" for ground-up development needs to include financial literacy, an explanation of metrics, and how they work.

Understand the fees involved and calculate the total cost for an entire year of management so you can compare the different managers.

In that case you should get an attorney involved as encroachment would be a material issue that if known should have been disclosed both to the broker and to any potential buyer.  

I will always take a deposit unless I know the people involved.