That property was bought by an institutional client who lipsticked it and is trying to play market metrics.

"There is a 10 foot hole in the living room floor leading to the basement" and we want to play with the price, gets a completely different reaction from most sellers than "There is a broken rafter in the NorthSide of the attic".

What’s the play here?

Since we just got our first property in November, it might even be too early to talk much about leveraging equity.Instead of typing out all the things I know about this stuff, I'm just going to play the noob.

If you know their motivation for offering seller financing then use that to form your deal and try and play into that motivation.  

@Amber Miller, PMI only comes into play when you have less than 20% to put down.

Also, for a fix and flip, who are some key players, you would want to have on your team (ex. roofer, painter ) I have tried meet-ups, but I haven't encountered many people who are willing to share their connections. 

I don't mind the early payout, but it is difficult to plan on keeping this money in play when it comes back sooner than expected.

ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_shareBoth books encouraged getting involved in communities like this one.I can be pretty technical so I’m recreating some of these rental income calculators in excel to help get my feet wet just playing around with potential properties.But my plan at the moment is to meet people, find people like property managers, CPA etc. and just to overload myself with information.I have the older book you mention in my amazon cart now, many of the reviews seem to agree that it is a good reference.And also where I live (on the border of Boca Raton Florida) almost everything has HOAs.

Market knowledge is your secret sauce the more you know about your market, the key players the properties within the better positioned you will be to move.When it comes to approaching other investors and agents, you have to build that relationship gradually, be involved in the networking events you attend and take part in conversations and try to add value, and soak it all in.