Lacking access to the financing to buy and build on large acreage, my thinking was to start small with a couple acres and build one or two homes, get some experience working with a lender that I can hopefully parlay into a bigger development the next time, and so on …Would love any advice/thoughts on this!

I hope that helps, feel free to reach out if we can help at all on your journey. 

You can hear real-world examples of how others have built their investment portfolio and (hopefully) learn to avoid their mistakes.4.

The company seems to be all over it so hopefully this gets repaired but we will see.

In Denver and Colorado Springs here, there's a style from the late 50s and early 60s that's great for the house-hack hopeful where when you enter the backdoor you can either turn left/right through a doorway into the kitchen or you go straight down a stairway into the basement.  

Hope it helps!

Ultimately the borrower sold the property before sale so it was a non issue but had they not, and had we continued with default, if we did not restructure the foreclosure (difficult), we would have more than likely had to wait until sale, suffered a loss, then filed a title claim (Time...time...time...) to hopefully be made whole. 

Good luck and I hope it goes well for you.

God forbid something happen to the spouse on the property, and the other spouse loses rights to it!  

I would be 1031'ing for sure bc there's no way I'd be able to stomach losing all of that $ to capital gains.