Check a reverse mortgage.Find a landlord willing to trade, booty can go either way, seller financing the differences.Know any "private" investors/lenders?

A good negotiation technique is to trade items of unequal value, which is why cash investors often beat out normal folks who are offering more (cash for investors not huge, but time and a guaranteed sale for the sellers are.)

I'm an IT business analyst by trade so gathering data and sorting it out sounds great to me!

Start with a small multi flip using hard money (or a combination of my money and hard money) and then trade up to bigger multis (1031 or carry over the note) until I reach the kind of cash that the bank or lender would consider as enough skin in the game to lend me the rest.4.

@Dennis WeberUBIT is simply a tax that applies to a tax-exempt entity when it engages in a trade or business on a regular or repeated basis.  

I'm a carpenter by trade and am familiar with building permits, and I should have been more clear in my first question that I'm assuming all renovation work was permitted if required. 

Do a work trade for rent, if at all possible.

I worked for multiple publicly traded companies and learned the hard truth that the share price has NOTHING to do with how the company is doing business wise.

Plus, if it allows you to use the same overall dollar value of properties but have less roofs and similar or more rent, it would be an equal trade with less work. 

Tons of people moving to the area, schools, trade, economy, etc.