After doing an initial walk through and coming up with a renovation budget and sales comps we decided to offer $105K (Yes an offer $65K LOWER!)

Buy a nice property- maybe even pay up a bit for a lower cap rate, and demonstrate to him the steady income you've begun to generate with your capital(and hopefully a lack of problems with tenants as well.)

It's a two family and recently the lower level became available so I have been there a lot getting it ready, showing and I see the two of them together all the time.

I already tried to buy a house but the appraisal came up lower than the price of sale and the owner wasn’t willing to lower the price.

With Adwords the lower you bid on keywords I've found the lower quality search terms we get.

The pre-existing tenant is a great perk, but it doesn't guarantee that they'll stay, and the lower down the prop class ladder you go, the higher turnover you're likely to see.

Feel free to reach out to me with your time frame for completion.

But I haven't met many successful 'self-made' CRE investors who haven't lowered their pain factor, crunched their timeline or increased their learning curve without seeking out a mentor or two on the way.

I used at  least 5%,  since I’m rehabbing everything and don’t like to go lower when analyzing.  

In my opinion you should take out a new mortgage against that house, and use that capital to keep investing in more property.If you take out the loan and intend to occupy that property for a year, you can get 80% loan to value and about .5% lower rate.