It also has several opportunities to house hack the estate which include a mobile that I am renting ($1000mo), walk-out basement that needs updated but can be rented, and a building that looks like they were trying to make a duplex but the county shut them down for not getting the proper authorizations.CURRENT NEED: GUIDANCE, MENTORSHIP, and maybe a little more GUIDANCE.

Last year, we actually looked at 2 commercial properties, one pub, one fast food restaurant.

Mind to share the name of that Chinese Restaurant?

It is pretty routine in this area to arrange for utilities to transfer to the owner when they are shut off by the tenant, especially in the winter.

Some things to look out for are the fees. environmental fees, excessive weight fees, another trick of the industry is billing cycles. some will bill monthly so you are billed 12 times a year others may bill every 4 weeks so you get billed 13 times a year (52 weeks/4= 13 bill)based on my experience the big guys tend to play ball and kill on volume to shut out little guys. also these little guys rely on the big guys station to dump, so they charge a base fee and mark it up or put add on to make money.

(sorry ... not free)of course real estate is one application, but this does the same thing for retail, bars, restaurants, food trucks, contractors etc...Thoughts from the group???

@Prakash Bhatta  The two most common ways people steal electricity are:  1) by tampering with the electrical panel and bypassing the meter  2) or by fraudulently establishing service in someone else's name (i.e. identity theft) and then not paying the bill and just running it up until the service is shut off due to non-payment. 

As a landlord your criteria is the HUD criteria which basically does not include any training requirement.So the restaurant can deny access to an emotional support animal (an animal that in no way has been trained to help a disabled person)but a landlord is not allowed to deny the access to the support animal.What I am seeing is that people can pay some money to get an animal classified as a support animal even if the person has no need for a support animal. 

I know many people that rent out units short term and they were eventually shut down by the city due to violation of city and state laws.

I am going to put an offer on a bank owned REO, but the issue is that all the utilities, i.e. heat, water and electricity have been shut off.