Firstly, well done for persevering and trying every avenue you thought would get you the data you needed.Most would have caved earlier and handed out there hard earned cash for old, saturated leads/records from the same prominent platforms which dump them pretty much when they receive them from either 1).the same large brokers AFTER the county has listed them on the county website or, 2). from the counties themselves directly AFTER the county has listed them on there own website, or, 3). from data scrapers on Upwork/Fiverr who scrape the data from those same platforms AFTER the counties/brokers sell those platforms the data being scraped by the freelancers.Anyway, rant aside you seem to of made the same mistake i made when I first started branching out away from providing leads to my original couple of clients i got from Upwork who wanted me to scrape data from court records in FL for pre FC leads.Simply, I didn't know where to look for the information I needed in states outside of FL.FL only allows the judicial route to foreclosure so I only needed to know/find/scrape the data from Lis Pendens documents for counties they requested.

Do not be surprised if you lose your entire investment and maybe more, if you have a recourse loan.On the other hand, real estate is a forgiving asset class.  

And definitely  not to the the refi before hand.

I went to a learn-on-the-site program that our local REIA had recently.  3BR/3BA house, owner is probably in 145K after fix up (I know the purchase price, don't know what was spent to get it ready after purchase) and a handful of years later it's now worth 190K. 

#7 I almost think you are trying to get a perfect property with no work or effort on your part, that is easy to manage and will be hands off passive investment.   

Or one needs to be a lifer  IE never sell hand down to kids.

You can definitely do this in Phoenix, but be prepared to be hands on. 

One can be close to a hands off, passive investment depending on a few things.

On the other hand, these both are markets that are growing steadily so once you improve the property the equity is there.

A handful of DSCR lenders will cashout refi after 3 months seasoning, but the vast majority require 6 months.