We give up a portion of control which is possibly more risk yet lessen risk by gaining diversity across markets.

They can either help you pull the dream along or add extra weight for you to pull. 

Hello John, Having a good agent to assist you will take a lot of weight from your shoulders.

You need an unbiased opinion.Here's a research done by a lender for multi family (they have offices in many parts of the country - excluding Cincinnati) and they reported that Cincinnati is a good city to invest in: (in fact, institutional investors have recently flocked to it - if you want to succeed, watch where the "big money" goes to)https://arbor.com/blog/cincinnati-multifamily-market-expansion/Cincinnati is where I invest and I live here, so yes I am biased but again, put more weight on the above report.

There many injustices going on here , discrimination, intimidation and the use of fraudulent documents to try to intimidate but hold no legal weight and are arbitrary. 

@Jim Cellini - Chicago and Illinois Taxes suck - it is what it is - luckily most of us understand if the numbers work then we have the tax bill covered.It seems like you can only trust the current market comps to determine an accurate evaluation and government agencies clearly are NOT detailed enough to properly assess homes except really from the outside and from what they have seen completed through "permits" so they get inaccurate numbers.And with respect to Zillow, it's just an algorithm at this point and still not accurate enough to fully trust with much weight.

But at the same time you will not accept someone only being needed to finance only a portion of the deal which decreases the expenses of financing because they could have made more by using that money to their advantage.Is there a better way to accomplish Mike's objective factoring in the cost of money, opportunity cost, and some kind of weighted (il)liquidity factor?

Your current equity build up is lessening your return on equity and using it for new purchases makes good sense as long as you don't overdo the leverage, which you seem unlikely to do.

Time to hit the punching bag or lift the weights.

Originally posted by @Paul Tibok:Thank you everyone for your feedback, very helpful it took a big weight off my shoulders.