Me being a professional over thinker can confidently say… find something that makes sense and go for it, trust the process.I like BRRR, 18months ago We traveled to atlanta, toured like 3 properties and made an offer…. didn’t went trough… but the owner had another house, a dumpster in sw atlanta, close to US 41 in an up and coming place… fair price and enough upside….We bought it and I’ve been re building it up the last 15 months….Didn’t made us rich, but i got my feet wet and learned a TON now i discovered MTR and chose that route, looking to scale the business @Nicolas Londono Gut intuition is best, I always say you learn more from losses then you do your wins!

Does all of the loss come from their down payment, or only part of it? 

.- a couple of missing expenses: lawn care and you might consider loss of revenue on insurance which will cause insurance expense to go up. 

@Ronny Crawford second position means you get second dibs on getting your money back if the deal goes sideways (foreclosure, fire, etc.)You'll record a mortgage against the property.Some things to think about:1) Hard money lenders charge points, it's their insulation against non-pays and weeds out the people who aren't serious (and increases your profit, of course)2) Don't lend to them unless they include you as a loss payee on their insurance, and don't lend to them if they are under-insured (you want to make sure you get paid if the house burns down, for example)If you don't mind, could you share all the terms of the deal?

I fronted all of the money for down payment and ongoing expenses, and we split the profit/loss at the end of the flip. 

Less important initially, but also good to get insurance loss runs on a building this old (at 50 years) along with identifying functional obsolescence items (e.g. no central air). $200 (even $500) is a giveaway that you didn't get a quote and do your homework. 

Crime has unfortunately gotten out of control  in select areas but the Chicagoland area in general has seen a loss of people wanting to live there.  

As for my other properties; they are all landlord policies through Allstate and they cover lost rents in case of a loss.

One word of caution, don't take a first job that is oriented around construction or construction management, I have found it very hard for folks to move from construction to development without some loss of career traction to do so.For example, I come from a family of real estate developers, but I was ambitious to learn rapidly and work for others in the multi-family development domain, so I obtained my first job (asst. project manager) for a division of KB Home (Kaufman and Broad Multi-Housing) that developed in-house apartment projects.

For vacancy, I usually budget around 7-8% since that equates to about 1 month of loss rent per year.