My closing date got pushed now to Tuesday, 2/20 causing my timeline for availability to lag (I'm trying to suppress my frustration as I type this lol).In any event, I target the Hudson Valley area - Newburgh. 

Thanks, I am very frustrated with this situation.

that is frustrating

It’s frustrating and exciting.

There's nothing that frustrates me more than reading about other people on here who jump into REI and "play" landlord until it hits the fan and they have no clue about their local bylaws and codes.

You've got the right idea about buying a bargain somehow, but if you put all your hope in an individual short-sale, which as you know would be slow, you could be setting yourself up to becoming frustrated, over and over again.

This is my first rental property, I'm hoping future tenants aren't this frustrating.

You could cobble this together, but would do so much legwork in finding the right partners and getting  a properly structured LLC entity that any savings in dollars would be balanced out with time and likely frustration. 

@Emily Powell investors like @Joe Koppel, who have 4-5 locations +, can start to get frustrated by all of the paperwork if their agent can only insure 1 location per policy.The easy solution is to put all locations onto a single commercial policy. 

Lately a lot of people have mentioned feeling frustrated that they can't find deals that cash flow on the MLS.