We have not been able to secure financing and had conversations about it.

You need to make sure your tenant screening is very thorough and also your property security is top notch.

Both of our employers now offer roth 401k contributions instead (with matching going into regular 401ks), and I may take advantage of that too, but another small hit to cash flow.At some point, do you just suck it up and take a 10% penalty?

According to the article, around 5% of the properties are being bought by investment companies, leading to concerns that regular homebuyers are being priced out of the market.1) Do you think this could become a long-term issue, given that the current percentage of investor-bought properties is relatively small?

While both involve finding and properly securing a site and bringing it to full entitlement, the ground-up process includes the land piece but gets way more involved and complex to execute.The full "Monty" for ground-up development needs to include financial literacy, an explanation of metrics, and how they work.

Transitioning from builder’s risk to a regular property insurance policy might be the way to go if the sale takes longer than expected.

Also, right now we are utilizing FB but we may change this next year to a platform outside of FB for better interaction and more security.

We embrace S8 applicants, but screen them just like any other applicant.Many have an entitlement mentality and try to leverage their S8 voucher by pretending to be helpless:1) A percentage won't apply because they expect a landlord to waive application fees for them.2) Many cry broke and expect a landlord NOT to charge them a security deposit.3) Many of those same S8 tenants trying to avoid paying a security deposit, won't make an effort to call the list of nonprofits we send them that will pay their security deposit if they apply.4) A lot of them try to avoid paying for utilities.

@Nadia Jones Starting and running a fund is a separate business because it's something that you need to actively market for and regularly work on attracting capital to invest in. 

For a regular 1031 you will find a range of prices from 900 ish to 1500 ish for a complete exchange.