I definitely wouldn't sign a purchase agreement before seeing the property.

Some of these new age syndicators are raising money in incredibly small amounts and I believe are intentionally pursuing these smaller dollar amounts because of the unsophisticated individual behind those dollars.

A con would be that a cost segregation strategy was implemented, and the investor sells it within 5 years with no intention of doing a 1031.

We want to purchase a property to begin building our rental portfolio but are unsure of the best approach.We live in Sonoma County, California, and I work in Healdsburg.

Hi Mike,First, I want to emphasize that my intention was never to provide misleading information.

We have a 14-page management contract that we've added our real experiences to over the years, with the intent of protecting both us AND the landlord.

Too many newbies seem to think they can blindly follow "old" advice in today's real estate market and be successful.Many, basically get taken advantage of by those in the industry that have an incentive to keep newbies blind to new realties, just to keep their good times rolling.What many newbies have figured out is that they can't make the numbers work on rental purchases in their states - like California, Arizona, New York, New Jersey, Washington, etc.What they have NOT figured out is that if they go to cheaper markets, they aren't being shown Class A rentals to buy.

The details of the incident remain unclear, but they intentionally granted access to someone who subsequently stole major appliances.

Meet with a local banker & schedule a time to talk with a mortgage broker, they'll give you at least a baseline of what kind of down payment options and rates are out there.After that, if you're still wanting to research more creative options, do some looking into seller financing (a very hot topic with good, and bad, advice out there), look into private lenders, and commercial financing options.If you're wanting to live in 1/4 of your quadplex, then conventional residential loans may in fact be your best option as you can purchase that with a fannie/freddy loan with very low down, and use up to 75% of the income from the property toward your own income. 

Of course, that is only if your intent is to hold it long term.If your goal is to unburden yourself from managing the property yourself, you do have options that offer degrees of hands free management.