I'm going to get a survey regardless, but I'd like to line all this up before I start spending on soft costs.The weird thing is I see other investors doing these DADU deals and I've never heard anything mention the above requirements / scenario. 

There’s a lot of valuable information out there without spending thousands of dollars.

You can spend as little as $100 to form an LLC, or you could use an attorney and spend $1,000 or more.

Get educated and make an educated guess on where to spend money.

Before you spend any more energy or resources on this endeavor explain the precise fear that has you wanting to transfer this property to an LLC.

(PS I'm sure you experienced folks have your contractors in line already but it never hurts to add another trusted one to the phone book, I'd love to send over our business cards and talk about how we could be of assistance to your team) Again thank you all for the help - Brennan 

Would love to travel there more often & spend more time down there. 

Then don't rehab for zero COC return.But if you can spend $3000 on the lite rehab and increase rent from $1000 to $1050 then you'd gain $50 per month.50 x 12 = $600 more annually because you rehabbed.600 / 3000 = .2 or a 20% cash on cash return! 

They spend a ton of money on advertising their product and apparently have none left over to spend on product development.

I used the simplified 501c3 filing to start my own and to assist 7 other start-ups.