The simplest way is to just invest in a REIT or a real estate ETF.

My wife and I are starting a Brokerage over the next several weeks and are looking at the cleanest and simplest way to run our back office.

Yes, to drill down to the simplest form have an attorney draw up mortgage documents that would protect you and given you the first lien in the event that things take a horrible turn and you are left not only holding the bill but also a half finished product that you can turn and sell to someone else or finish yourself to recoup your money.

So I went to a couple of REIA meetings and got a bunch of books and dumbed the learning process down to the simplest form. 

It's definitely the simplest option.

In the simplest terms, how many houses sold in the last 12 months?  

````````````````````````````````````````````Simplest strategy is to enter into a lease and a ROFR, get a 1003 Mortg app on the Tenant, get the tenant to lender and see what the chance w DTI and credit and other issues the renter can get the loan. 

Do you just want to find your retirement home and have the simplest possible course of action? 

In the simplest terms, my goal is to learn while I earn - ideally learning more about the investment side of real estate.

This is a city code/zoning problem and my attempt failed for the simplest reason: frontage on the street was required to be a minimum of 100ft and partitioning would have created 85ft.