While the initial costs are a consideration, the long-term ROI can be favorable if there's sufficient demand in your market.

The whole point of making it is to get to a place where it does not matter if you are getting your full market value or not.

Welcome to Bigger Pockets Drew, I have done a couple of wholesale deals in my market here in Greensboro NC.

Based on my market knowledge, 350k for a new constructions with close to 3k in rent seems like a fairly solid deal for the area.

The best first step you can take is to connect to a great broker with market knowledge and existing deal flow.

I intend to buy them 10-30% below market value through my LLC. 

If you bought down the rate it would take longer for the market to improve enough to make refinancing worth it for you. 

A local lender came to my market center in the last year and talked about this....is there a box you can check when filling out an application that can let you "opt out" of the credit bureaus selling your information?

Since you have a background in software engineering maybe this could be a gap in the market you could fill. 

They have been on the market for over 150 days each and he cannot sell them.