The more rehabs you do the better understanding you will have of the market for contacting work and materials.Doing a rehab every so often prevents you from being sharp with your budget.For those with limited exposure, ask others in the industry and always run your numbers based on being overbudget and overtime. 

Meet other investors in your area and stay in touch with them; you can ask them questions that might prevent problems.Best to you!

But, they do get to eat a lot of pizza.Debt prevents you from becoming an investor. 

Newer construction code requires better earthquake-proofing, but it's still aimed at preventing a building collapse rather than holding the value of the structure.About 15 years ago there was all the talk about "100 year homes" but I haven't seen much come of that.

You can check out this group to know who the players are.

The rules are designed to prevent related parties from engaging in exchanges that shift high basis property for low basis property, followed by a sale of the low basis property, effectively "cashing out" without recognizing gain.If you sell a property to a related party as part of a 1031 exchange, both you and the related party must hold the exchanged properties for at least two years following the exchange.

Hire only “A Players”.  

I don't think we will be able to afford a 1.5M+ mortgage without a huge down payment (sale of our house).I feel this would be going backwards as we would focus on one property preventing us to do other things.

If you hire a PM, your financial account structure can be simpler.If you plan to continue purchasing rentals, I like some key accounts at the "management" level (income, opex, tax, owncp, reserve) and only have 1 checking account per property to prevent having 100 accounts and unnecessary complexity.

@John Voychick I'm so sorry to hear about your experience, it really pains me to hear about people getting subpar treatment and customer service I always listen to people's experiences to make sure that I can prevent these kinds of things from happening to my clients.