Is Indianapolis actually worth the flight from California or should I just keep buying tired landlords in Tulsa

Your Tulsa math is solid and the assumption doing the most work is the one you've already named: relationship capital has a dollar value, and you've actually quantified it. Six days at $48/day is $288 on that single incident, but the compounding version of that same dynamic across a full rehab timeline is where the real gap lives. A GC who bumps your job because you're not local costs you two weeks, not two days.

The Indy spread issue is real. Purchase at $87k, rehab at $74k, ARV at $215k puts you at $54k gross before carrying costs. Model 150 days of carry at hard money rates, add acquisition and disposition costs, and you're landing exactly where you said, $28k to $33k. That's not a margin, that's a buffer. In a gut flip where scope creep is the dominant risk, a buffer and a margin are not the same thing. You need enough room to absorb a permit delay, a structural surprise, and a soft week from your framing crew without the deal going negative. Your Tulsa number at $195k ARV with $136k all-in gives you more of that room, and you're not paying a learning curve tax on top of it.

The risk you didn't mention is on the exit side. Indy has absorbed a lot of renovated inventory in the $210k to $225k range over the past 18 months. The ARVs people are quoting may be trailing comps from a faster-moving period. Confirm whether those comps are from the last 90 days or the last 12 months, because in a market you don't know, you won't feel the softness until you're listed and sitting.

The $40k threshold you named before entering a cold market is a reasonable discipline. What's your current Tulsa pipeline depth, meaning how many deals at that margin can you realistically run before you'd need to expand?

Your Tulsa math looks solid to me. At $62k in, $74k rehab, $195k ARV, you're sitting around $59k gross before carrying costs and closing fees. That's meaningful cushion on a full gut. The Indianapolis numbers people keep showing you ($85k to $95k purchase, similar rehab, $210k to $225k ARV) are generating $40k to $45k gross at best, and that's before you account for the carry premium on a market you don't know.

The thing worth naming precisely: your $48/day hard money cost (hard money is a short-term loan from a private lender, priced by the day, not a bank mortgage) is already in your Tulsa model because you know your subs. The six-day plumber story is the real point. You didn't save six days through luck. You saved it because you had a relationship that took two years to build. That relationship has a dollar value you can actually calculate, and it doesn't transfer to Indianapolis.

The strategy guide for full-gut flips notes that carry overruns from contractor delays are one of the primary margin killers in the current environment, and it recommends modeling 120 to 150 days minimum, not 90. If your Indianapolis baseline is 90 days and your Tulsa baseline is whatever you've actually been hitting, the comparison isn't $28k versus $33k. The comparison includes however many extra days a cold-market project realistically adds.

I'd want to know one more number before I could say anything useful about your Tulsa deal specifically: what are you actually landing on days to close across your last few projects there, versus what you modeled at the start?