SDIRA recommendations: want to purchase house quickly

[Laura M.]

My neighbor passed away unexpectedly. He was a lovely man, but a real slob, and I am trying to buy his house from his next of kin, a brother & sister who are not as eager to sell as we had hoped. The place needs a lot of cosmetic work, but is essentially solid and we want to buy it with IRA funds, and then use it as a rental. We can add additional unit(s) in the back yard. I have acquired a rare illness which means that I have become disabled over the past year, with small children. We are self-employed, and since I've gotten sick we have had to shutter our former business and focus on adding rentals to our portfolio. Fortunately, we are continuous renovators, and we have several pieces of property that we have been able to purchase and rent with excellent returns. I bought a house last year (also on our street) with a mortgage, and I withdrew funds from my IRA to put down the downpayment. Because of 12 other emergencies happening at the same time, I just withdrew the money, and didn't put the property into an IRA. (I withdrew it tax free because it was all principal on my Roth IRA).

Questions:

1) I presume that I cannot retro-actively put the house I’ve already purchased into a SDIRA. Is this correct?

2) I am looking for recommendations to quickly move IRA funds from Vanguard into a Self-directed custodian. Which custodians should I consider?

3) I really need to consult a disability lawyer, but I am going to be applying for disability benefits, so any advice on keeping rental income from being counted as me “working” would be appreciated. We currently have 4 rentals (2 long term & one on Airbnb, and one RV in the yard of our commercial building (!)), and we are managing a couple of others for family members.  I’m the planner, and my husband enacts the plans. I used to be very hands-on involved, and loved it, but my health has made that extremely difficult.  It is our intention to keep adding rentals to our portfolio  for a while, as we are well-suited to owning and maintaining buildings, and we really enjoy the process of buying ugly properties and then transforming them into something that can bring us a really regular income from renting them.  But for the moment, we are just trying to take advantage of the opportunity to purchase the house next door, which we can always flip if we don’t have the mojo to fix it up ourselves. Either way it will benefit us greatly to have control of the house and de-junk it. If nothing else, it will add a lot of value to our own house if we improve the street a bit.