Ideally I'd like to not worry about crime and be in a market that is growing and economically healthy and sound so that 5-10 years from now I'd have a good amount of equity in the investments I made to buy more deals. 

You need to have contingency plans and extra capital for when things go wrong.All too often, new investors with no money are the ones who want to leverage to a high degree when, in actuality, it's generally something you should only do if you have a healthy amount of liquid capital.  

developing land the right way will take a tremendous amount of mental power if you're deciding to developing the land for an investment venture to gain a Rate Of Return (ROR)  on your investment and structure your deal to accommodate a healthy percentage in leverage to minimize risk.. you'll need to really really focus and forming a business plan before anybody touches a hammer.. we need to analyze a lot of different variables before we can accurately determine if the investment is worth the time.. focus on the type of property you would like to build first.. if your devolping for an investment you need to research your areas demographic real estate "situs" the situs is the hottest location in your area for buying and selling of homes and in each hot location theres always a certain style property that sells the most weather its a 2 bedroom 1 bath or a 3 bedroom 2 bath regardless you need to analize your areas demographic and once your determined the property type you need to get an engineer to draw up foot prints so you can present the floor plans to a contrusction compnay and rememebr this is an investment to so any way we can minize our expiences will ultimatly grow our profit so you need to get bids from several companys and you need to ask them their estimated time of completion becase that can affect profit to... when you have our cost to build the home you need to perform a residul land method approach for determining the maximum purchase price of the last.. we can determine this by minusing the market value of the home from the cost of construction devided by the percentage you want to see if profit from just the last and home alone but when we determine the value of the home we will use the Net Operating Income Approach so we can determine the capilization rate if your planning on renting out the propeorty for a monthy net profit for first you need to determine the average time it takes to get a tenant (usually one month) so be aware youll have to pay all the projected expenses for a month so for the valuation we need to take all the property expense like homeowners insurance, property mangament fees, utilites, property taxes cost cost, ect (not including cost of construction) the based off your market you need to determine the prices to rent that home monethly then minus the gross income accumlated from monthy rent and minus that value with the projected cost to find your Net profit. one the net profit has been calculated you need to determine the averge capitlization rate for your areas income generating properties but keep in mind this cap is just for the purpose of determing property value.. ultimatly your levering way more on your investment due to lowercost in obtaing the asset but youve called a broker and recieved your areas average capitalization rate or your personal desire  capitlization rate you simply devide the net profit for the year and devide that value by the cost of construction that will give you a percantage of the profits your going to be yeilding per months in net profit just on the building alone then we need to determine the actual value of the home will be considering the average cap rate 7% for example you would multiple the net income for the year and multiply that value to the 7% to get the value of the home. one you have the value of the home you minus the cost of contruction to calculate the MMP of the land it self.. for example with a cap rate of 7% the building would then be valued at 500,000.00 then we need to minus the estimated cost of construction 200,000.00 wich leaves us with 300,000.00 but if you are planning on selling the propeorty right off the bat you need to apprais the home through a CMA approah to get buyers point of view price and not an investors point of view but if your do sell the house after construction you need to deduct the desired percentace of profit you would like to yeild of your investment so for example we determined the home value is 500,000.00 and the land ls valued 300,000.00 totalling 800,000.00 - 300,000.00 for the land aquisition - 200,000.00 for construction cost will net you a margin of 300,000.00 or keep the propeorty and rent it out for a very large cap rate and make yeild on and extrely high leveraged deal and build wealth through appreciating and equity then possible sell the home after youve built up the operations and minimized expense and maximized your profit resulting an inflation of value based of NOI then you have create appreciate through propeorty operation or maybe through market growth.. if can also determine YoY market growth allowing you to calculate future rental rates and the calculating a new NOI resulting in the new property value.. determing growth in the value is a good step to take when holding onto an investment property.. 

Susan Knight it's healthy for everyone to see other peoples whys !

@Ben LeybovichIf I was in your deal and there was a 2X on the property value at sale before splits , that would probably give me a healthy multiple (based on the waterfall details) and I could easily re-invest the larger sum into any dozen trusted GPS to regain different losses again that same year.

and along with expanding our new home construction business.and put up my first website .. show casing our projects.Keep eating healthy and working out.. and enjoy the 8 grandkids. :)And finish raising the money for the Home we are going to give away to a first responder. 

We are really looking for 1.3 to have a healthy business and proper debt coverage.

.- Peoria has a healthy employment base but is heavily reliant on Caterpillar and two large hospitals.- Rents seem to be increasing. 

These are the sellers OFF market that may accept a healthy discount, but these houses come with issues that may be cheap to fix or may be very expensive to fix.

I agree in principle as well; there just needs to be a healthy dose of common sense in the process.