He is here to start a new business and currently works at a restaurant making $45k/yr. his application is very good with a credit score 733 and previous yrs income of $75k-$100k.

So he told me what to offer and it was accepted.That said, the home had a lot of hidden costs because it was vacant and everything was shut off, that it was hard to detect up front.  

Especially the days when you discover that big capex like a roof being blow off (happened 2 years ago), some tweakers climbed up on the roof and gutted the A/C (did two of those in the last 12 months), an evap cooler leaked for so long that the drywall on the ceiling of the kids bedroom caved in (last year), the hot water heater blew a hose and a major leak went unnoticed for 10 hours flooding the hall, kitchen and living room (dealing with that now), the tenant smelled gas outside, the gas company came and shut off the gas because the underground pipe is corroded AND also discovered that the water heater is not venting properly so it got red tagged (just dealt with that last month) or the time the tenant "invited" a homeless guy over, he moved in, then called his other homeless buddy up and he parked his crappy RV with his entire family living in it in the driveway.

I'm excited by the residential and commercial real estate market of Southern California, and want to begin to explore investing while continuing to focus on my career in hospitality operations & sales/branding & entrepreneurship.I focus on opening and building operations and sales systems for event spaces, specifically venues converted from industrial buildings and independent, site-specific hotels and restaurants looking to create or repair revenue streams from weddings, corporate parties, workshops, and in-house programming.

We had the utility between tenants and it was a bad deal for us as we had several tenants fall behind on there bills and utility company transferred into our name auto even while they tenant was living there and fell behind on there rent then they continued to stay through eviction running bills up and we was not able to shut off as we was not a utility company and land lords are not allowed to take it away here in Ohio so we got screwed and still trying to chase them from job to job attaching wages its been years.

I make a decent living working at a busy restaurant here in town, but I am very interested in using real estate investing to provide me with some financial freedom.

I've again shut the ads off.  

But the neighborhood lacked a certain je ne sais quoi - oh wait, I know what it lacked- services and restaurants. 

Let's do a BP get together at a restaurant nearby and head to the conference after.

I live in Franklin and it is 10 minutes to Cool Springs (mall and commercial area with every store imaginable) and you are just 30 minutes from Downtown which is not so much shopping, but great restaurants and a lot of events.