If the property is vacant, include property preservation costs including bimonthly yard maintenance since many juristictions may impose a fine if the yard is overgrown. 

I work for a company that does Property Preservation work, and I am in charge of pictures.

@Ryan Rubel something a bit different in the Bay Area (and many other HCOL areas) is the preservation of capital for a lot of investors.

There is unpaid interest, lender paid taxes/insurance/property preservation, court costs and attorney fees, etc.   

Churches, alumni, fraternal & social work agencies, or organizations typically, along with thousands of arts, education, cultural & industry specific associations make a lot of effort to donate, or subsidize housing---in particular. if your mortgage is $ 300K at 6% apr using $ 2,500 a month in the first few years nearly $ 18K will be deductible. if you're renting to some tenants certain programs will filter far more inducements to both you and the tenant. obviously there are reasons that you'd most likely want to own units that cost $ 60K and rent for $ 1,500 a month to make even more sense out of these opportunities. when i was 23 my best friend a newly mented attorney, who lived with me pursued buying a 2 family home that the City of NY's Housing Development Preservation (HPD) offered us for $ 1. it needed about $ 150K of improvements. we were supposed to borrow the $ 150K at 1% interest under a very aggressive renovation schedule that returned the property to it's fully taxed  assessed value in 90 to 120 days; or we'd have to pay 2% apr for the sums we elected to borrow from an HPD aligned lender. my income was 3 times the lawyers; and i wanted him to live in another 26 unit apartment building we were developing under an even more lucrative program that allowed us to borrow $ 500K at 1%, if we ("I") put down $ 25K. i wound up renovating the apartment building on my credit cards and we walked away from the 2 family: due to the lawyer's reluctance to move into the apartment building. i actually felt that having him in my own apartment really confused the women that visited me.

The Stanley Mickelsen Safeguard Complex (SRMSC) is an Anti-Ballistic Missile complex which was developed to preserve the United States’ second strike capability against Soviet nuclear missile attacks.

A BK or divorce could make transfer very messy.An insured warranty deed will preserve the chain of title which will make it cleaner to sell on the back end as you will have to warranty title as a seller.I prefer to use title companies so sellers I work with feel everything's on the up-and-up.Wm

Preserve wealth?

I want to preserve the deposit to cover future or unknown damages.

Most people want to preserve a feeling of being the supreme investor who is all put together, feels confident in how they run their whole business, and to me...puts on a good show.