Is the 50% rule just for a quick evaluation?

There are a ton of ways to invest and evaluate real estate.

Where I am, the vast majority of 2 families purchased within the last 7 years cannot yield positive cash flow. 3 and 4 units are likely going to be evaluated as businesses if you can demonstrate that they are cash flowing businesses.

When evaluating a potential market to invest in, what indicators do you look at? 

All non-accredited investors, either alone or with a purchaser representative, must be sophisticated—that is, they must have sufficient knowledge and experience in financial and business matters to make them capable of evaluating the merits and risks of the prospective investment.506c: a company can broadly solicit and generally advertise the offering and still be deemed to be in compliance with the exemption’s requirements if: The investors in the offering are all accredited investors; andThe company takes reasonable steps to verify that the investors are accredited investors, which could include reviewing documentation, such as W-2s, tax returns, bank and brokerage statements, credit reports and the like.Again, it would be wise to check the SEC guidelines, but sponsors have the ultimate responsibility to ensure their investors meet the requirements.

This is a great time for you to evaluate what exactly went wrong in your analysis and use that information for future deals. 

@Andrew Zbrzezny depending on which lender you go with your ARV is going to be based on a combination of market comps, and income or one or the other.I have seen some banks just do an income based evaluation and some just do market comps. 

Dave Lindahl is super good at teaching about the finances and how to evaluate a deal in the MF arena.

You do still evaluate the deals as always.The alternative is to vet every single deal sponsor/operator and work directly with them.   

I'll work on saving up more and educating myself on how to evaluate properties and crunch the numbers.