These are all outside of your control.

Find Brandon's videos on YouTube for the "four square" method of analyzing homes and practice.

Research the appropriate laws for your property and follow best practices to avoid any discrimination accusations: use the same criteria for everyone who applies, know what the protected classes are, which questions are legal to ask and which aren't, and only deny applicants for legal reasons etc.

Update: We ended up backing out of the commercial deal, way too many issues going on and shady practices that we were not comfortable engaging with.Now the question is what to do with the chunk of money left after we pay taxes.

Practice running the numbers.

There is no such thing as "cruise control" in student rentals.

Now, I know someone could say the cost should be "negligible" couple of hundred dollars a month, in comparison to the whole buildout budget, but still I do want to know what are the best practices out there.

If not, even though you are a re pro, losses are passive & deductions are limited.There are 7 scenarios that will qualify as material, and you only need to meet one:*500 hours*Substantially all participation*> 100 hrs and at least 1/2*Significant participation*5/10 years*Personal service activity w participation in last 3 years*Continuous participationTo materially participate, you must be involved in the operations of the activity on a regular, continuous, and substantial basis.Once you pass the pro test, the material participation often comes along for the ride.You can elect to aggregate all rental real estate for purposes of measuring material participation under Sec. 1.469-9(g).Your time spent on all your rental properties (STRs don't qualify) counts as one activity, making it easier to materially participate.In order to make a strong case with your CPA and the IRS you need to document your hours.Best practice is an hours log where you are as specific as possible.

As you said you are currently still employed there, so you can't do it right away until you leave employment there.Second, once you've rolled over, you can setup your SDIRA as a regular account (where fund release has to go via your custodian) or setup a LLC checkbook option, where you can write out a check for your choice of investments.Yes you will have full control over the use of funds in your rolled over SDIRA. 

As others have said the house hacking idea is great,  I have an investor that will be getting control of a $1m quad for just $75k.