This often leads to complacency which is seen by the trail off of attendance at these meetings.

If I convert those monthly nets into annual nets and plug those in to see what amounts of cash in would lead to those results in each case, I come up with:Scenario 1: $2000/month ($24000 annual) to equal a 12% return means you're in $200,000 cash. 

I know a broker who spends like 20k - 30k per year in buying leads, paying for blast emails, buying lists of names of investors, etc.I like to meet people on the personal level first, I feel like people are way more responsive if at first I help them by answering questions, or offering advice, provide them with incite, etc.Most people do not know what they are getting into in those first deals, which is why we hear so many nightmare stories. 

Assuming this is in fact a good deal, and your friend is a qualified GC, instead of trying to be the lead investor, he should be searching for someone who has the balance sheet to take down this deal on their and be a transactional participant.

A strong buyers market indicates sellers price cutting and listings being bought under value which would lead to equity losses. 

If your realtor is listing it for free and not helping, that's not much help since leaving you to screen tenants and run through leads is like asking you to perform knee surgery, you don't know what you are doing.All rental listings should get bombarded on Zillow Rental Manager and HotPads, etc in the first week so if you have limited activity, your price is either too high or the photos are bad and the copy about the place is bad.Use something like RentSpree from screening.

TLDR: Pre-approval seems like a good thing but it can lead to lost bookings or a time sink (has anyone spent less than 20-30 minutes on the phone with VRBO trying to fix something??).

And I'd hope people have enough wit's to figure if someone BS's their way to get "biz leads" there probably going to BS their way through/around anything/everything else.     

All my peers and clients who previously bought tax sale properties moved away from the strategy a number of years ago so I don't have any recent experiences to go off of,  but wouldn't be surprised if the lead time is longer this time of year due to the holidays. 

Influence or control can lead to a beneficial owner even if you own little equity.Also it is 20 FT EEs AND $5M Revenue AND a physical office.