@Brian Burns You're better off using a realtor. 

I would get insurance, but I also would rather be covered from a liability standpoint and also in case a tenant decided to burn my house down (whether intentionally or accidentally).

Yes I have seen (burn offs) in the note where the guarantee goes away once a certain LTV or pay down is reached.

IF you get in there right way and start fixing things yourself, its a hard habit to get away from, and then causes heart burn when you do have to pay someone. if you have the mentality that someone else always does the work in it, then you will not need or want to swing hammers. again, its just a mental conditioning thing. and solely my opinion.

Passing it on to the next person to get burned. 

That said, I'm sure you hope to live to be 59 and older, and having a big fat pile of tax sheltered income to draw from at that point in time would be a benefit, even if you have done other things to allow you to leave the rat race at an earlier age.With a self-directed IRA, you can diversify any existing savings into real estate and potentially get better results than investing in conventional financial products.  

That's it ... that is how you best tailor the message and configure the reno to end up with the result you want on appraisal.Now, granted, there are still some dumb@$s appraisers out there that can still screw it up for you even if you did everything right ... that is why you need to keep multiple profitable exits and sufficient margin of safety to cover any such unforseen events ... for example, if you are leveraged to the hilt on hard money prior to refinance then any little hickup in any of the steps can put you over the edge, and sooner or later you're bound to get burned ...

I understand that there might be debt and a chance I will get burned but getting turned down without the opportunity to try is bugging the sh!

All tenants I've ever had, replaced them when they burned out, if they did, and none of them ever "took" light bulbs.

All that to say that people bring opportunities to us now...not so much prospecting going on.The third thing you can do is direct marketing but I suggest you get really good at talking to people/sellers first before you start burning money on marketing, otherwise it's just a waste.