It's really a question of being able to see the potential of a building, navigate rent control, get your buyouts handled BEFORE removing contingencies, and renovating in the right aesthetic to extract the highest rents.

The buyer slides the pile of cash across the table along with all the opportunities that go along with controlling such a large sum of money.The deal closes, but just before it does, the sticks his greedy, sweaty hands into the pile of cash and extracts a measly 2.5% of highly taxable earned income.

basically introduce yourself to the community, add value to the community, before you try and extract value from the community. 

I look forward to growing with the community and can only aspire to one day be a meaningful contributor to it. 

They are moving, I don't think they feel like getting it perfect to list on the market and extract full value, they would rather take equity in it at a discount to me and go retire with little worries/ the hassle.  

Don't know if it is meaningful or not, but even with a $0 down payment you still are "into" the house for some non-zero amount - you probably have paid closing costs, an inspection, etc.You could always estimate those costs, and use that number as your effective initial investment in the property.

This information is extracted from a larger analysis I did on the topic.

I am here to learn all that I can and hopefully make some meaningful connections.

I would prefer to ultimately build the business around extracting maximum rent from higher maintenance tenants, and less rent from low maintenance tenants within the same buildings.At this stage, say I have 2 tenants that started renting at $1000 on a 12 month lease.  

If you extract the original equity and sit on the cash to deploy at an opportune time you can always use it to pay back the loan if you're struggling collecting rent to cover the mortgage.