Converting Single Family home to Multy Family

[Dinesh Siwakoti]

Greetings BP Community Members,

I am relatively new in this forum and to real estate in general. I have a question here, if there are any way we can convert tiny single family home sitting in 0.4 - 0.5 Acre to duplex/ triplex/ 4plex. 

I am looking for real estate opportunities on Rental Properties area where I wanted to buy Duplex/ Triplex / Four-plex. However, after some analysis , I came to know that in my area, the supply of such properties as extremely rare and there are 100's of investor ready to buy as soon as these properties are hitting the market. Or whatever are still not sold or available to purchase, those are unattractive in terms of investment perspective.

Now I wanted to shift the gear and look for those properties I described above (single family home sitting in 0.4 - 0.5 Acre to duplex), and convert them into duplex myself. Could you please guide me through understanding this in terms of how to identify whether or not I can do that. How to find out if local city will allow me to do so? 

Thank you very much for your advise. Kudos to all members of BP community. 

-Dinesh S.