Duane, I personally do not like to finance an entire deal, for that matter I like to have a very low debt ratio.

Another concern is the massive personal mortgage my father obtained in 2021.

I would be cautious of investor hours such as research and education as these can get some investors. 

@Robert Trevino Right now in my market the cost to build is just so much greater than the cost of purchasing existing that unless you’re building a personal home no one is building.

This topic can be very specific to each person's situation. 

My personal rule of thumb for profile age is that if the profile was created before 2015-2016 (when the internet started to get a bit crazy with misinformation ahead of a certain presidential election), I'll generally proceed as long as they're interacting like a normal person (not a bot) and their profile looks otherwise legit.

Are you going to go with residential, personal lending, or commercial?

Out of the three areas you mentioned, personally I would prefer Cincinnati in that list.

My perspective comes from a lot of personal experience, including a couple of properties I chose to hang on to for many years, because it would've been more expensive to dump them in the interim.

The Operator or the HammerThis is the person that actually runs the physical asset - property and asset management, project management - takes care of the day to day gritty details of operating rental property.