@Jennifer Stutland it would depend on your goals and how much time and effort you are willing to dedicate to the business.

Opportunity to "be the bank" but the borrower didn't pay the last bank and I'm not any different than other lenders.Worth the effort to pick up properties for $5-20k?

Maybe the tenant's who can't park because of the violators will appreciate your efforts.  

Then, accumulate profits from those two lines of flips to generate a third.Now you start buying rentals from your profits...every time you flip those original 32 houses...over and over again.The secret is to NEVER spend your money...only use it, as many times as you can....and then, compound the use of the profits from the houses generated from the cash you never spend.

My most recent experience however, is that my competition  seems to be secretive and not willing to share information that could be beneficial to both of us in the near future.

I wonder though for anyone with a larger number of units, if the effort to purchase 4 and under rental units is any different from that of 5+ units.

The $500 flat rate sounds right to those who will only give a name and number so the effort is worth the $.  

I'm taking some time to learn the business in an effort to avoid the "crash and burn".

This usually just simply means someone went to the effort to place the property in a trust, to avoid probate upon the owner's death, at sometime in the future.  

How much time and effort am I prepared to dedicate to this?