Infrastructure 
4.

But buying vacant land, without such infrastructure already in place upon the property, can be lucrative as long as you enter into the deal with your eyes open and a clear strategy for what you’ll use that land for set in your mind.

The infrastructure AND wages (little manufacturing, mostly service related jobs here) is not here for the amount of people that live here and will never be because of the populations massive resistance to any new taxes.

And the second is poor infrastructure.

Hey buddy I live in Nova Scotia Canada and I am virtually wholesaling in NC, I have studied Jamil Damji's book "How to Wholesale Real Estate: The No-Cash Strategy to Build a Scalable Business" there is a section specifically where he advises agent outreach, I have followed this by contacting 10 agents a day everyday to build a CRM of agents that send me deals, both on market and off market, it has taken some time but I have decent deal flow now and they have a vested interest when they send a deal and are for the most part willing to go see the property for you, take pics, get infrastructure info etc. just make sure if you are using agents that on the state purchase and sale agreements permits you to assign the contract otherwise you will need to include an addendum in the contract to allow you to do so.

I can offset some of it if I buy $200k worth of CD's or Treasuries and monitor the market but still the cash out would decrease my cash flow by 700-800$.

Some areas that may be worth monitoring around here in that price point are Beechview, Brookline, Carnegie, Verona, Bellevue/Avalon, and more.

For instance, during the 2008 financial crash, the majority of multi-family units in Las Vegas were vacant.In 15+ years of dealing with residential and commercial investments, I have never seen any investor sell a performing asset. 100% of the time, the property was losing money either through tenant issues or deferred maintenance.While there are some multifamily where the interiors have been updated, very few have had the expensive infrastructure replaced.

There's billion dollar companies and infrastructure set up to help agents be successful, you just need to tap in to that. 

Also, please make sure to use an investor agent because they've already set up the infrastructure in terms of having lenders, GCs, property managers, etc.