Precisely for the reason you indicated, underwriting these as % can be very misleading :)Now - once you establish a dollar amount, then you can back out a %...

I have several rentals but never would put any RE into a retirement vehicle because you lose a lot of tax benefits.

Real estate is a vehicle that can help you grow wealth due to the ability to leverage your resources. 

You can run precision targeting based on your favorite areas for flipping areas specific PPC campaigns at a whopping costs of under $50 per month.

@Keith N.I'm glad you were able to get some guidance and come to the decision to look into an IRA vehicle for now.  

If you have some cash, but have collateral (vehicle, boat, etc), what collaterals do you own to put towards the Down Payment?

Since the numbers worked (rental income was more then our expenses) I convinced my wife that It would be a good idea to not sell the townhouse, but to keep it and rent it out, as I had seen through research that real estate could be a great investment vehicle.  

On the other hand, after talking to locals in the Denver area, the only types of deals I could get involved in was providing private money on flips, which I really don't have any desire to do (I already own shares in REITs, hard money lenders and private investment groups and want to diversify away from further investing my money in these types of vehicles).

Investment vehicles that are structured as a combination of loan and equity participation will have all four elements for a single investor.

I try to be very clear and precise in what i'm looking for and what my goals are and just when I think I have my answers I'll ask something else that they should have answered with the information I had already given them.