Side-skirting booking engines from the big players like Travelclick and Synxis would be a huge money saver.  

If you look at construction world for bigger projects, one of the buzz words is "value engineering."

It's already the 4th geekiest city in the country with all of the smart people working for NASA & the private sector engineers servicing NASA. 

I once reverse engineered my goals and realized traditional saving 20% down and purchasing was not going to cut it...at least at the pace I wanted (and frankly and probably not at all). 

DH is a network engineer and I have worked in ministry/non profit settings as well as customer service settings. 

I'm an engineer, trained and licensed so that lets me kind of 'lean' in to the more challenging projects. 

I've had a few contractors give ball park quotes around $10k3) Proceed with the code compliant retrofit. $4k for the engineered plans, $700 for the permit, and (according to the engineer) $20-$25k for the work itself.

Memphis Invest sent me an engineers report that contradicted my inspection. 

This is just the latest in an arduous process, to find the deal under market value on the land, rezone it to multifamily district (long and costly process), permit a six suite rental (difficult with many technical fire code and structural engineering challenges), build the units (using all my experience in home building and every possible favour and technique learned over the years to project manage), get financing to finish construction (from a private lender after the bank lenders totally dried up on this type of financing), and pre lease the units while under construction to quality tenants.  

In both cases I needed a letter from an engineer stating that the foundation was thick enough and sturdy enough for my plan.