Grew up in Glen Ellyn, great town - glad you found your way to BiggerPockets - it's worth signing up for the PRO level to use the built in calculators (under Tools).

We followed his lead, even joining a 100% commission, very low support brokerage in exchange for him promising my wife and I that we’d achieve a Keller Williams level support from him, without the painful commission split.

Also in your neck of the woods is @Dave Holman, Who's after mid-level SFRs to rent.

While I think it's a fair price, would it hurt to offer a lower price?

Alright, so the PA states that the lower unit will be vacant by the day of closing.  

The "bonus room" is a bedroom that was a garage conversion, so it's a bit awkward in that it's on a lowered slab compared to the house by a step.

All blue collar neighborhoods with lower crime (C class in my mind).

This may be a long post, but I thought it would be good to walk through everything step-by-step, and explain my thinking along the way.If you want to stick with me through it all, here we go:I was not going to be getting a conventional mortgage for my first property for a number of reasons.First, I am still annoyed at the hoops I had to jump through to get a mortgage for my primary residence.Second, my liquid cash was on the lower end.Third, the properties that I would need to start out with would not be financeable anyway.Fourth, my DTI is on the high side, due to the decision that we made to take out a HELOC to complete interior improvements on my primary house.So, I decided that my path was going to be to form a single member LLC, and take a loan from my 401(k) at work to finance the down payment.Since I do not view the 401(k) loan as a long-term solution, I am treating like hard money, and pay it off ASAP.So, my first deal would be a flip, or a rental that was such a good deal, that I could re-fi out and pull all my cash out.I decided to reach out to the commercial lending department of the local credit union, which I am a member.The person I talked to (who became my lender) is fantastic.I told him what types of properties I was looking for, and that I’d look to turn them into rentals, or to flip them.I will never forget his response, which reminded me why I love this credit union.He said:“Typically, the deals you are talking about are much smaller than the deals we like to do.However, we also realize that you can not get to that level unless someone helps you get there.So, if the numbers make sense, we will see if any of our products fit.”Awesome!

Perhaps there is an agreement there that the tenant will fix the property in exchange for a lower rent, but it is not happening... per the owner.

@Amanda Moore I'm not a wholesaler, however lead capture and follow up are pretty universal concepts.. so my question/suggestion to you would be this: I am assuming you are at least receiving some amount of phone calls from your marketing which tells you that you have at least some level of an interest to sell from property owners.