@Dustin Allen  I definitely wouldn't try to tackle it without a lot of assistance from consulting/engineer company.

Get a Real Estate lawyer from the area and see how you can tackle this.

Still lacking experience (and confidence) to tackle an extensive project like this on my own, I reached out to a local investor with who I had built a relationship over the past year.

Clair like an idiot for the last 4-5 years before I caught the RE bug and now I'm just trying to figure out how to tackle my housing expense but this is the issue I've been stuck on.

Or you can come up with creative deal making strategies if the seller really doesn't want to deal with agents.Lastly we tell them this is not something we can tackle, and tell them to just list it with their favorite agent.

The reason for the analysis is to compare purchasing a SFR vs an owner-occupied duplex, both with conventional financing 80% and 85% leverage, respectively.I'm having a couple of difficulties in this analysis and wanted to see how most members here tackle some of these questions: I have seen some posters on here note that you should underwrite the duplex as an investment property with both units rented, however, I am having a bit of trouble wrapping this around my head, because I am in fact comparing an SFR to an owner-occupied duplex and not other investment properties, how have some of you approached this and underwriting to an NOI?

Take their advice, find your funding before tackling the auction.

@Yosef Ajami to tackle several questions that were brought up, yes values can drop.  

It includes a reading plan that has most of the books Larkin's mentioned, but can help you tackle them in a structured way.

My advice if you wanted to tackle this on your own would be to look at competitors that are performing really well and just noting down some of what they’re doing and try incorporating that to a degree.