I have spent time on the PaperStac site, but they seem like mostly “dog” notes and not ones that I would want to own or trust to buy.

I've spent weeks and even months dialing these things in to get the results I was looking for. 

. $300sqft to build at least.If you have any sort of mortgage on the property you will need an attorney to handle the mountain of paperwork the bank will give you for a lien release. 10k+, also probably some nightmare terms to have to build and sell immediately and god knows what.At this point a year has passed and you have spent at least $60,000 cash, you're about to break ground on a structure that will cost you at the very least $400,000 to build, you are still 1 year away from cashing out because you have to now build a house.

I feel my money is best spent building a portfolio of cash flowing units.

I spent some time in Lakewood and saw this kind of thing more often than most other places I’ve been.

That said, realistically, I don't think you can go below the 6% - 6.5% range.One question I would ask is if that 3% can be better spent somewhere else to de-risk your deal.

These were investments, the value of the assest are there, its the liquid that ran short and had to resort to credit cards to fix up the propertyYou spent $50k from savings, borrowed $50k from a 401k, and are paying it back over five years at around 7.5% interest, then borrowed another $40k from credit cards and are paying that back at around 8% interest, maybe more.

The key difference, though, was he spent months carefully getting to know the local architecs, reputable builders, and even a couple of niche design firms that specialize in modern builds for mid- to high-end buyers.

The process for commercial properties is basically the same as residential properties, so it takes work.Again, echoing Dominic, a good investment is a good investment, whether you spent 8 months courting an owner to get them to sell to you, or whether it is on CBRE/Cushman/Marcus/Loopnet or any other brokerage website.  

Generally larger commercial properties and shopping centers are easier to classify with hard and fast rules, but to the points above the residential areas really move very quickly and have way more nuance than most people care to admit.zip codes are generally way too large for my liking at least in my market to provide any kind of insights other than macro level economics but even then highways or rivers that cut through a zip code can end up with totally different trade areas.we can get pretty granular with cellphone data and with grocery center data to understand the trade areas and their true boundaries, but that kind of data pull is generally only cost effective for investors doing larger scale projects or developments, and honestly we still just end up getting on the ground and feeling it out, so I generally tell people that the money is better spent on a plane ticket and weekend trip in the area you are looking rather than any kind of "trade area" level data studies.and generally B class in 1 area means something different than another.