This is an education platform that happens to focus on real estate.  

This issue has gone away with the online auctions since your deposit amount must be in the auction platform account prior to bidding.

You can PM people and make your presence more personal in that type of platform. 

She seems to lay things out pretty straight forward and I like the turn-key simplicity of her investment platform.

Using a professional solution for online applications would eliminate the risk from those items, so I'd seriously consider using Cozy.co if you're just looking to start as I believe that's free to you, while AppFolio or Buildium are much more comprehensive property management platforms with screening features built-in.

the owners haven't had a strong platform to grieve their assessment (or are unaware that they have this option).  

It will be tempting to designate those occasions for leisure time / letting friends stay, but can also be the more profitable days of the year if you are doing short term stays through platforms like Airbnb.

I was wondering if anyone used a crowd funding platform to buy commercial multi-family properties? 

We can debate which platform, Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, are better; at the end of the day they give us easy to search data base of past and current sales, rent, crime, schools, like you and @Christopher Blanco pointed out.

Social media is great because other like-minded investors and REI professionals will have a platform to organically connect with you, and you never know, you could be doing business with them one day.