As an investor event's like this make me stay away from investing within 5 miles.I have decided to open up my search range within an hour out of the city such as Yonkers, Northern NJ, and even a little further.Also as a primer on calculating ARV to compare two properties use this file http://www.biggerpockets.com/files/user/JasonScott/file/estimating-arv by @J Scott

You can use the price they bought it for as a data-point, but it's really secondary to the what data you can find in recent, comparable sales.Hope that helps!

Having both will grant you with more confidence and greater access to necessary information (not to mention saving time, as you will not have to wait for someone else to allow you to view a property or provide comparables as your wife can now carry out such tasks).

I would guess that there's a lot of variation within that area, so you may need to more clearly define your target market within Florida, so you can compare apples to apples.

Compare this to places like SF or NYC where few places to expand to and old style rental regulations constrains housing supply to a certain number of units a year so you either buy the higher prices or move. 

I thought the $1k fee was fairly reasonable compared to another "big name" educational entity,(scam?)

If we were to do a full technical analysis we would have to compare commercial loans to 30 years conventional and factor in risk and expected rate changes on the 5/10/15 year terms the commercial loans carry.

Definitely no set way you have to do everything, but basic things you always want to verify-- location, quality of the property (property inspection for sure), market rents (especially if needing to compare to what is being advertised), taxes and insurance costs, major due diligence on the management company since essentially the fate of your investment largely lies in their hands, tenants, etc.

You could charge a very low interest rate amortized over 30 years that would be pennies in monthly interest cost compared to the higher interest of the credit card.The question here isn't "can you do this".

For Non-Disclosure states, like Texas, it doesn't necessarily always show what a property last sold for, but if you go to the "Comparables & Nearby Listings" tab, they usually are pretty good about having some comps...at least in Texas...not sure about other states...and in some counties you need to click the "Both" for the Data Set bar, if the default selection of "Public Records" isnt' really bringing up anything.