I honestly tend to shy away from Home Depot most popular because so many houses will have the same. 

Do you confront them honestly and show him how you are trying to get better and how you have his best interest at heart?

. $3,000 goes very quickly when you're doing value add.IRR is also, honestly, a poor metric to use despite its popularity.

Be honest with yourself on your skills, available time, etc.The recent rate increases places the RE market in an unfamiliar state. 

Honestly if the market is going up you can make rookie mistakes and the market will generally cover you, however when the market is declining like it is right now rookie mistakes often get compounded, so take the next few months really keep learning, consider your goals and most importantly your risk tolerance and once you see signs the market is recovering jump in and as long as you’ve taken an appropriate risk for your situation and prices are going up you’ll be fine. 

The fluctuating taxes in Illinois and Chicago specifically are definitely the most challenging part of investing here.We honestly underwrite our deals conservatively with respect to taxes and look at the % increase in that specific neighborhood over the last 10 years and use that to interpolate moving forward over the next 5-10 years. 

If I am being honest it seems like with those numbers you are getting a low rent.

I don't have some mega portfolio of sec8 making me the expert here but I wanted to mention this for one reason: I understand my time is more valuable and honestly, my lack of knowledge is a liability in this arena.

Keep the relationship and be honest if and when you change to other locations. 

The backyard feature is cool but (I'm being honest here :) ) it looks like a dump - dirt on the floor, what appears to be some kind of trailer park or similar on the other side of the trees, mismatched chain link fencing, mismatched chairs, etc.