Basically, I was getting bad deals because they either a.) didn't understand the ARV/rent potential or b.) didn't understand that rehab costs are more than just materials (pesky labor). 

For at least the next year, vacancy isn't going to be an issue (and if you're factoring in tenant turnover costs assuming they bail, their security deposit is 2-months worth of rent, or $2,200, so if they broke their lease and lost their deposit, that would inherently be a significant boost to my cash flow - this property has a track-record of taking about 1-week to fill when vacant, and I've familiarized myself with all of the current landlord's marketing methods and materials to keep it that way - but for the sake of this, we're going to pretend they stay).

Hi @John WhitridgeYou have to look carefully at the invoices / materials the owner has spend, in order to figure out what they had spend on the property. 

On the other jobs I contract I leave it to the contractor to source their materials. 

Although the benefits are great, their can be a significant amount of lead time which includes negotiations, marketing, permitting and construction which can take up to 36 months or never even materialize.

That said, the quality of this marketing material is insanely low, so it wouldn't be hard to do better than the rest.

Im going through the process to refi now and was just going to get the loan to pay off the seller ($105k) and $50k worth of materials financed.

There is also an option to mold the transition with cement, epoxy, or hard moldable material.

It's amazing the community and educational materials that are available here!

they both have excellent educational materials but I like the realcrowd 101, 201, and 202 power points, they are ~15 pages and explain the basicshttps://www.realcrowd.com/learning-toolsI started investing in deals last Jan, I have no interest in any site except as a customer.