What EXACTLY is a Turnkey Project?

[Ndy Onyido]

Hi BP nation,

I am very sure you all will be rather surprised to see this often belated question come up again? Well, I am forced to ask this question because I have read a couple of REI machinations being bandied around and called ' turnkey', even in this site, and its about time we provided a clarification of what this truly means, especially now that the Turnkey-reviews.com is now up and running. I have reviewed some of the posts and the claims made by those reviews and advertising there.....well, that's a post for another day..

We have quite a number of experienced and well respected bloggers who run 'turnkey projects' on this site and I follow a number of them: 

@Mike D'Arrigo 

@Larry Fried

@James Wise 

@Joe Pickett 

@Jay Hinrichs

@Ali Boone 

and quite a good number of others I cannot name off my head now.... and I will like to know the following:

• what is the universally recognized and BP-nation accepted definition of a turnkey project in REI?
• What are the characteristics/terms and conditions  associated with a project for it to qualify as a  a turnkey project?

My primary reason for asking this question is that I am an out of state investor (from Canada), and my policy is what I call 'Remote REI Strategy', hands-free, no contact with tenants, and I don't want to be called by 1:00am that a bulb is burnt out....strictly no involvement with daily property management and all that come with it..... I will let someone else do all that and I pay for the services as PM fees.....this is my understanding of a turnkey and all my investment decisions are channeled towards this goal..

I am hopeful that this question will attract attention and comments from seasoned experts from BP nation to provide clarification to this. This is not meant to spite anyone but strictly for my personal education ( am closing one on Feb 27 in KC, with many planned for the year and I need all the education I can get from my primary constituency-the BP nation).

Thanks.

Ndy