Today, the neighborhood has been completely torn down and renovated.

In order to achieve your goal of 75 units in the next few years or beyond this goal, you should start looking into buying larger properties.

He knows the apartments are survivable at best and they know he's the only person that will rent to them.Each unit will need to be renovated - some structural but all are to modernize.Local landlord tells me no matter what a person does this place will always be a $450 per month per unit rental. 

Now if I got into larger multifamily or notes that could be more challenging and interesting.

If the rent is already $400 over the median value and the property would require a lot of work to rent to a new tenant, you are not going to be able to get back your renovation costs in small rent increases for years.

The larger monthly payments resulted in negative monthly cash flow the past 9 years.  :(  At the time, we thought that was a smart move to basically defer our gains/short term income in the interest of having a paid off property in 10 years.  

I'm finding that estimating repair/renovation costs is tricky, but probably gets easier with experience.Best of luck!

Does it now or could you do a renovation to the exterior that would make a good first impression? 

I'm in the process of Renovation and it's been a bit slow going due to contractor being backed up.

Take a 203k FHA loan, and the 5.5% interest rate to renovate all units. 2.