That's one spot that an overreliance on using only an attorney on your team can get you in trouble. 

Here are key pitfalls to avoid:🛑 Over-reliance on relationshipsKnowing someone personally doesn't mean you know their financial stability.

By making them produce multiple pieces of information that corroborate who they say you are instead of placing over-reliance on one that can be fraudulently procured."

If you're over-reliant on one lead pipeline, you'll be struggling if that lead pipeline dries up.

What if you say you want a 10% return, well you're going to get back a lot of dumpy places with high returns and miss out on a lot of great properties that only get back 9%and we are only talking about seller pro forma calculations, so you're going to miss out on a lot of potential deals because of the over reliance on a single metricinstead, how about you say "I wanted to see all 3/2 SFR between 50-105K selling price in these zip codes" and maybe address some locations you don't want to buy in. describe your investment criteria by the asset you want to purchase not by final ROI. 

The 5% he is wrong about IMHO is the absolutely zero debt and the over reliance on "growth stock mutual funds" as the best investments.

I caution the over reliance on the balloon to be a substitute for good underwriting.

It should be very clear to you if that rental income is or isn't being counted.If the lender can't show you that simple math, then it's likely that either they have deal-killing overlays, or they are over-reliant on glitchy software (which can also be a deal killer, I've literally had to walk underwriters through manual math to convince them that mortgage software doesn't understand mortgages, so here you are with the old fashioned math making it work right in front of you that I've provided yielding a 32.388% DTI and not the 74% that the software is spitting out, now go spend an hour on the phone with tech support to fix the software, and I look forward to the updated loan approval email in my inbox once you've done that and the software reflects 32.388% DTI, thanks).Basically: "Show me your old fashioned back-of-envelope math, or GTFO."

I buy these places because Pittsburgh has magnificently bad weather and my business model requires that I keep them in the portfolio and running for years.Perhaps what this disaster in Texas reveals most about rental real estate investors as a group is our over-reliance on housing inspectors who tell us very little about the suitability of buildings to bear up under harsh conditions, our over-reliance on numbers analysis and ignorance of basic construction fundamentals, our over-reliance on long-distance investing business models that leave us practically helpless when things really go bad for our properties and our tenants.

If tenants were to suddenly become highly mobile and you found yourself being afraid, then you've discovered that you were over-reliant on those barriers to mobility.