Nobody wants to "reward" bad behavior, but if you can rid yourself of a problem quickly, you might save money in the long run.

I generally use 8% to be on the safe side.

@Felicia Richardson I basically just found neighborhoods with duplexes that I felt matched my criteria (safe, in reasonable shape, strong rents in areas that were either growing or would remain stable), used Zillow/Google Maps to help get the addresses for all duplexes those neighborhoods, and then typed the addresses into the county assessors website (not sure if your county will have a site that allows you to search properties by address, but ours does).

Thanks for the quick response.

We didn’t intend to buy and sell so quickly, and we sold it for what we did because losing the 7ft of land changed our house plans and essentially, we are making no profit.

So I should find the property first, save atleast 40% to be safe, then contact banks to see what my buying options are.

Quick closings, good customer service, low fees, interest only payments and desktop appraisals in many cases.

You'll be able to tell pretty quickly what level of service they provide fairly quickly.

Fairly expensive, but a realtively easy / quick way to nail down a great property.  

Also, We would like to create a fund so that we are not waiting on money to come for each deal, as we would like to close quickly and not wait for different people to fund.