When I have built my business up enough, I plan on focusing on buy and hold properties with a few flips as they present themselves. 

The owner of Creditsense presented at my local investor meetup about 6 months ago for the second time.

Yeah i heard that the meeting "Real Estate Investing Trenches Unfiltered- Scott Patterson" is an awesome meeting and is actually meeting tomorrow night at the Olde Meck BreweryWe have a guest speaker Igor Gorlatov who will present on Negotiatingand my topic will be "8 Fears Real Estate Investors have and How to B***** Slap Them"Good times and actual education

We had a great presentation by @Victor Jernigan on this topic at our Knoxville REIA meeting Tuesday.

Your sellers and you cannot require that a buyer actually get a loan from a specific lender, but your sellers are free to instruct you to throw away all offers that do not contain a preapproval letter from a specific lender without ever presenting them (just like your sellers can say "if they aren't putting at least 10% down and offering at asking, don't even bother showing me the offer" and you can/should honor that), and you are free to put those instructions from your seller, to you, on the MLS.

Would it be safe to say, you weren't present at the property at anytime prior to submitting an offer & the inspector was just doing their job notating everything that wrong?

I am presenting to a private money lender this week and basically I can't decide if I should try to convince him to loan the entire purchase or just the down payment.

So here are my questions: How do I present myself in a way that will ensure I am taken seriously since I have zero experience, and how can I connect with specific people I'm looking for on biggerpockets without getting my posts deleted?

And finally, the water damage that was present I thought would be unsalvageable, but that came out fine too.

When you bought it, you weren't able to get a homestead exemption plus the value was brought up to present market value.