You can ask seller to pay closing costs to help reduce costs. 

When you are a new investor and want to build you will pay 2-3x more than you expected and it will take about 4-6x as long as you think going ground up.

Once you find a house that you believe would be a good rental, meaning desirable to your target market of customers (people within a couple of mile radius of the place), and all of the costs of monthly ownership that you can accurately project fall below the rental amounts that you project that you can get from your target customers, then you have a possible business asset that you can use to produce income, and have renters pay down the mortgage, while hopefully it goes up in value at least with the rest of the economy. 

Issue is he is paying 750$ a month for the 3br/1ba unit, market value for the area for the same type of unit is $1,819.  

Don't get me wrong, I feel like a good PM is invaluable and have no issues paying one their 10% to properly manage my property and take away my headaches. 

Often, these insurance companies are able to pay a higher rate and desire a nice property to ensure they keep their customer happy as they go through an extensive claim.

Essentially paying down my principle puts more equity in my pocket for when I want to tap into this resource.

I would like to see about putting a tiny home on the 2 acre property and selling it to pay off the mortgage on my main property.

We were talked into paying in full (we know we know!)

Sure it will cost more and take longer but consider it the price of your education.Other than that your option as others have point out is to find the money to finish it off the books of the hard money lender, sell it or refi it and pay off the lender and move on.