You can advertise you have a contract for sale.Get a sale and purchase agreement that can be legally assigned and sold for an 1 to 2% assignment feeIf you don't want the rehabber to know how much you paid for it, find transactional funding or get on title somehow with private lender funding or find a joint venture partner to provide funding or get on title with Hardmoney lender funding so that you can buy at first and then resell it.Illegal Wholesaling only means that you're not telling the truth to the seller, and you have no intention of ever buying it, hence the reasons for all of this loud noise about illegal wholesaling.Wholesaling is legal in every state as long as you follow good business practices.

Maybe have your own home improvement co.

The units were also being upgraded (albeit at a very slow pace).So, as you can imagine I was super excited to find a deal where we could not only improve management, but also increase rents and not have to spend a ton of money to on CAPEX and repositioning.

Zillow "...generates unbiased local and national real estate data and analysis on 929 metropolitan areas and approximately 10,400 individual neighborhoods that we provide to consumers and real estate, rental, mortgage and home improvement professionals..." (2) The Zillow database focus is data aggregation of 110 million properties with "information from tens of thousands of public and private sources."

Like mentioned above keep your eyes peeled for something you can improve or see creating the extra value possible in SD.

I don't really want to risk the due on sales clause resulting from a subject-to transfer, and getting a hard money loan to buy the house outright seems like a waste if i can instead setup some type of joint venture. 

OPM is what makes it in this business, thats Other Peoples Money. credit. if you don't have it, get it. if your credit is shot, fix it. go to www.annualcreditreport.com and work on improving that credit score. its free. and watch the podcasts here on BP. education helps, but it can slow you down. you have to jump in and jump the hurdles that you can and knock down those that you cannot. no on ever learned anything without getting started and failing a time or two. think of all the great inventions created in the last 200 years. not one of them was a success without first figuring out how NOT to do it. good luck to you

In those 65 years, you are welcome to lease out the building and make improvements (depending on what the ground lease says), and collect revenue.  

I got in the property for $15k down + $10k in improvements for a total of $25k.

Purchase @ a discount, improve the property,  then hold.