Hey Matt, My bad  that was not for you.

Not a bad idea at all. 

I have heard good and bad things about PayPal so I wanted to research other options.  

Not a bad first real estate story!

It's a small house in really bad shape that we see as a tear down.  

The good the bad and the ugly. 

Have you explored an Option to Purchase to give the owner some breathing room to find a replacement property?

We have an LLC, but were told we can't get a conventional loan in the LLC's name.So, we bought a property with cash in the LLC's name (bad idea in retrospect because we can't cash out refi it and it hurt our scalability).Now, when we buy a property - it's bought with a conventional loan in one of our name's and the other parties involved transfer money into the LLC account (then into the buyer's account). 

I don't mean to sound confrontational, but Peter is clearly looking for information on how to buy his first house in a new market, and to fill his head with delusions of grandeur about 20 caps will pretty much have him spinning his wheels and never pulling the trigger on anything.Peter, there are lots of nice up-and-coming areas in Tampa (there are also some bad areas to stay out of, namely Sulphur Springs and anything around North Howard Ave by Downtown).

Like with any other industry, there are a lot of bad deals out there and folks don't want to get burnt.