On deals like this, the way to make money is to sell before you have to spend anything on capex, and also hope you have several maintenance free years.

I'm reading up on several books on the hold strategy and everything I can find online.

This is the "burned out landlord" approach where you can pick up several properties at a time... or perhaps their whole portfolio at a discount, and they are likely to understand what you are looking to do so there is less to educate the sellers on.Hope this helps... good luck!

I found the door open several times.

We worked on several projects for KB Homes, Lennar, Standard Pacific, and smaller players like Brehm Communities.

There are several Chicago investors here.

I received in the mail two free "killer Converstions" CDs that were really quite interesting, taken from a boot camp in which severeal seasoned investors told about there successful programs wherever they were from, which was all over the country.

I haven't even started the repair on that unit and probably will not for several months.

It's hard for me to call myslef a real estate investor at this point, once I have several deals under my belt and a bit more 1st hand knowledge I'm guessing I'll have a boost in my self esteem.

We are bidding 10K below sales price (it has been on the market for many months).Our agent had several suggestions to get the repair $, including:get 20k commission to realtor and he 1099's it to uspd to mtg broker as discount pt and broker gets it to usfind a lender who will loan based on post-repair valuedo fix&flip loan, refi when repairs are finishedThis will be our first rental purchase, so we are at a loss as to which is the best option.