Capitalism is about trading what you create with your advantages for what others create with their advantages (that you are disadvantaged at).

It will be helpful if the person is also familiar with 1031 Exchange rules.  

When I spoke to the president of the HOA, he told me that a 30% or better funded reserve was considered good but I don't have any basis of comparison and wanted to know if anyone had a good rule of thumb for how well funded an HOA of a 20 year building should be.

Go to where cash buyers work....at the courthouse steps buying at foreclosure auctions.If you see a guy bid on and/or buy more than one property,they are or work for cash buyers with lots of investment cash or lines of credit.Walk up to them after the auction and compliment them on their property purchases and offer to bring them more just like it before they get to the auctions.Ask for their criteria (sizes,locations,ages,numbers of bedrooms,condition,etc).Promise to follow up with them ASAP with a property they might like to inspect and purchase.Go to every courthouse you can get to in a few hours driving and you could easily create a list of 30 to 40 real professional cash buyers who act fact and know what they're doing to be profitable in this business.

Definitely would not rule it out!  

Once I am a bit more sure of the numbers I will probably create an excel sheet, to speed up the process.

Theoretically its possible to create an entity, put in some IRA money and some personal money creating a partnership between you and your IRA.

I'm sure people in both categories will talk about wild success going both routes, but my intuition was to the effect that it's much harder to find a 'deal' than it is to find someone who wants to list their house for top dollar on the MLS (while I certainly do not assume this is easy), but I only have so much time and money, trying to not only create a marketing budget but build systems around both of these businesses.

It appears we can easily get the 1% rule out of SFR rentals (I haven't seen any duplexes in that county) in that area.3.)

It's a not an exact science but a great rule of thumb to quickly determine feasiblity of a rental.