Mathew, From my perspective you need to talk with local real estate investors and a quality realtor to determine what is needed as well as paint choice options.

If you can't keep control of your personal finances, you are highly unlikely to succeed in real estate investing.

But with the new high interest rates it is very hard to decide if I should wait or bite the bullet.

I highly recommend Brandon and Heather Turner’s book, “The Book on Managing Rental Properties.”

Gives me hope there's a high ceiling, not Austin-like but enough upwards momentum to keep me happy.

So many new investors that live in high cost of living areas look to the midwest or other cheap areas to invest. 

We would not want to get into a long term relationship with the new buyer as it would need to be a whole new loan qualifiction.

A good option might be a hard money loan for the front end at high leverage (15, 10, or at most 20% down) and then adding value and pulling out equity via a DSCR cash-out refinances qualified with AirDNA projections. 

Most truly individual private money lenders don't love construction for a number of reasons: - Time horizon on these projects is too long and the project itself highly speculative - Most construction loans are non-dutch, meaning you pay only on what funds are released and PMLs don't like having to earmark additional funds that aren't deployed and aren't earning a monthly interest on

As far as outcomes... the goal would be to simply make quality connections with people and exchange some form of contact information with those quality connections.