You are completely wrong!

You may have to pay a couple hundred $$, but it's well worth it..Bear in mind that an hour walk-though may or may not uncover everything that will be on the final Scope Of Work....so add 20% to the number that you get from the GC.You will need to do this quite a few times before you will be able to do it yourself, someone said you can after just one time, but that would be wrong.

Real estate investments can be great so hopefully you can apply what you've learned here so that if you decide to try it again you'll get a better outcome.I think what may have went wrong here is you invested in real estate at the wrong time, and with the wrong operator (syndicator), and perhaps didn't have the expertise to sort either of those two factors out.  

For now, there's nothing wrong with doing your homework but focus more of your time and energy on finding a quality property to purchase.

But if you wanted to do an entire project with cash, I'd say you'd not want the entire project cost (purchase + rehab) to exceed 100k so your choice in projects is much more limited and also now if something goes wrong like the GC sucks or the market crashes, you are leveraged out 85% of your entire bankroll.  

Also deals this size take awhile to get to closing & like anything else the wrong clause or statement in the contract will kill the deal. 

HI Samuel,There is no right or wrong answer to your questions.

If I'm wrong, please, somebody correct me!

And when things go south or sideways they don’t really know where it went wrong at the agreement stage. 

I can't help on the mastermind front, but I did grow up in Central IL and can relate to the "something goes wrong with a property, now I'm spiraling, and this was all a terrible idea" feeling.