If you have historical rents at $750 and a purchase price of $42,500 on a renovated house (meaning I'm assuming it's finance worthy and rental ready), I'm a little curious why you wouldn't leverage it right off the bat?   

Great historical data and easily prints everything out as a CSV file so you can analyze it.

Purchase price: $70,000 Cash invested: $20,000 Sale price: $185,000 Live-in flip of historical house What made you interested in investing in this type of deal?

General contractors who do good work are busy, and they do not give a damn about your "proposed" or "desired" timeline unless you're a bigshot with a historic track record of throwing them multiple $250k jobs per year (oh, and GCs completely ignore "but I'll send you my future business!"

Louis area is super local and when I say that, I mean there can be falling down crack houses 5 blocks from $400k+ historical rehabs so when you run comps online, if you don't know where those dividing lines are, you can get into trouble. 

What are is the historical occupancy rate?

However I do know  historically Iowa has been a tricky state to navigate. https://whotv.com/2015/07/15/squatting-case-may-le...It looks like you live in Des Moines.

In 2012 I bought a duplex in the Lavaca Historic District, live in one side & rented out the other. 

@John Barry I would look into the following metrics:Supply: Research how many new units are coming onto the market in this particular submarket and the surrounding area.Demand: I would look at the absorption rates as well as the historical occupancy.

@Ryan Redenius - that level of cold was historic and only happens once every few years.