He/She may have to use a RMLO to draft this new paper to be dodd frank compliant... 

Since IRA owns the LLC it must be setup and filed in a way to be IRS-compliant.

I attended a Commercial Brokers Real Estate Breakfast a few months back and Ada Healey, Vice President of Real Estate at Vulcan shared that they've only built three condo projects in their history, and they lost money on all three of them. 

@Aaron Klatt, @ @Wes Short, @Gabriel De AlmeidaThank you guys, This makes a lot of sense.Above anything the motivation needs to be there for this to work .This gives me some more concrete criteria to go off of.

I've been searching non stop for an answer to my first question and can't seem to get a concrete answer.

As one extreme example of newer homes not being better, in Connecticut there are 15,000 houses less than 10 years old that were recently condemned because the builders used bad concrete on the foundations.

The costs of concrete, site work, utilities, permits, licensed tradespeople, heating systems, button-up, garages/decks, etc will blow you away.

We were talking about renovating our basement ourselves (it is bare concrete currently) and so I thought I'd do some research.

There may be some nuance to these structures I don't know but my suspicion is that there is a way for them to be 1031 compliant. 

Replacing carpet with vinyl hardwood, interior and exterior paint, replace A/C unit, minor concrete work etc.