After watching this lot for years and thinking how you could put an upscale set of row housing on it ... which would be set back from the street and would back onto the park ... and convincing the City that such a project merits a zoning variation, we cold-called the owner.

Without knowing your risk tolerance or your market, that's a massive variation!

We also had 0 responses out of 300 mailers  that week (and over the next 3 months we only had 1 call back), so we did a bit more research and saw how competitive the wholesaling landscape was in Seattle, and we just didn't have the time and energy to do trial-and-error to find the sweet spot.  

It takes years to build the right team, especially developing relationships with contractors, do that as you need them, trial and error.  

Trials and tribulations of real estate investing.

After a 60 day trial period of improvements and a rental increase i've agreed to allow the tenant to stay.

I would find them by googling hard money lender (or variations) for your area. 

Successful investors I know in these neighborhoods either do their own property management or have, through much trial and error, finally found or built a good management team. 

The truth is, you could read 100 books and still not know enough because certain things need to be learned through trial-and-error.

Trial and error always works so, I'm going to just do it!!