It had no utilities or septic, so I proceeded to follow all the steps - I've since paid for and completed all the County required tests and have approved building plans.

Quote from @Collin Hays: Quote from @Chris Watson: Just a few additional details to accompany the fuzzy math data. 

Philadelphia is a market where investors can perform quite well with proper market understanding but can also be a market where investors suffer big losses relying on bad data.

I am interested in using these funds for an alternative real estate investment strategy outside of long term buy and hold rentals (tax lien, air bnb arbitrage, commercial, data center). 

I identify property owners who have recently filed an eviction suit against their tenants, filtering the court data to pick out high-value prospects, as evidenced by:- plaintiff (landlord) is a natural person, not an LLC, corporation, trust, or apartment complex- active (unresolved) case status- large unpaid rent balance- plaintiff's address is an actual physical address, not a P.O. boxDepending on the state and county, I can usually extract this data directly from public data sources, such as online court systems.In addition to names and addresses, often this case data includes landlord phone numbers and sometimes email addresses!

The way around the self-sufficiency test is a conventional loan with 5% down, which doesn't have this requirement.  5% down is for owner occupied properties only (just like FHA).  

You can qualify for this by:Having tenants for 7 days or less at a time.Materially participate, typically with the test: You participated in the activity for more than 100 hours during the tax year, and you participated at least as much as any other individual (including individuals who didn’t own any interest in the activity) for the year.Here's a helpful article that covers material participation and other options if you don't have REPS https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/51/topics/1198185-how-c...

@Benjamin Carver Great post and some interesting data in the short-term space. 

Might be worth testing to see if it makes a difference!

You want BORING, simple, straight forward, consistency7 and factors you can readily see and understand via factual data.