Do you have any idea of the pain the owner feels when they see broken tiles because the tenant's kid had an oopsie dropping a heavy cast-iron pan?

The only way that would work in my view is if you had a plot in prime location & felt you had a competitive advantage in a niche (A+ luxury, student housing in dinky town, etc), otherwise the price and difficulty of building would far outweigh your profit.

But I can tell you Dallas and Austin are highly competitive, and from what I've heard about Austin, if you don't have a team and system in place already it's hard to get a foothold.

It takes a super heavy rain storm for the signal to be effected.

I started with wholesaling and closed 3 deals but this seems to be way more stable with way less competition.

“Normal” we are a brand new property so we had what we thought were competitive prices and had no yet made a drop for said virus

I think what it comes down to is getting the property to be competitive in the nature of the features like I mentioned earlier.

My layman's understanding of NAR's long standing anti-Trust argument is that broker cooperation via the MLS increases competition, and thus good for the consumer. 

Currently the city is an absolute seller's market -- most decently priced homes are selling within 24 hours of being listed, to where it's hard for me to be competitive without going excessively over (I'd be putting only 3% down).

For Philly, I found Safeco typically has the most competitive premiums for landlord policies.