What kind of junior anchors and large anchors are around the site (junior might be Starbucks freestanding, Mcdonalds, Chick Fil a, national brand gas station) or larger anchors ( Super Walmart, Home Depot, Publix, Lowe's, Costco, Target, etc.)You need to know how valuable your site is.

Since the down payment % is so low, you can afford to buy a much larger property (more units) than you would have been able to putting 20 or 25% down.

Yet another option would be to try to work out a lease to own option where maybe you can give him some type of larger down payment now and have your "rent" go towards paying off the property over a fixed period of time (obviously lots of legal and logistical issues here).

Any property owner can act as their own GC and hire individual subs to do the tasks.

You manage hundreds of units, so I can see why you’d want to keep on task and schedule, but for a single property owner I don’t consider this a big inconvenience.

For instance: you might offer a larger down payment for a smaller monthly payment.

In a SFR people will expect larger rooms but renters may be willing to compromise.

I can only imagine, if buying a larger complex, that you must need to wait 1 year plus to force appreciation and re-fi

If you only have SFH now, it's probably worth considering liquidating those assets and 1031 exchange into something larger.

Larger regional and national tenants often bargain for a TA  and get it since the landlord is often presented with a multi year lease - like 10 yrs with several 5 yr options.