I’d recommend taking the time to map out what your goals and dreams are and out of that exercise you can reverse engineer the best strategy.

Eating right and exercising.

With a Lease Option you still own it (until he exercises the option) so you get the tax write offs, the depreciation, the principal pay down and no capital gains until it's actually sold.

@Erin Dorsey Robinson Yep, I see this as an opportunity for investors to firm up their personal balance sheets, build up a war chest of capital to deploy, and exercise patience in the short term (waiting for market fundamentals to erode in the intermediate term, and for deals to become more attractive) and exercise aggression in the long term (capitalizing on weakness in the market as sellers' expectations are forced to adjust). 

In some cases, if you exercise the in-service distribution, you freeze your capacity for new contributions.Because the investment will be debt-financed, you may have exposure to tax on unrelated debt-financed income. 

Just as an exercise, run the numbers on a 4 plex.

This deal is already off the market but this was a good exercise.

Be ready to have a plan laid out in timeline (usually two years before traditional financing and you're saving up funds to make larger down payment during this time or pay cash to sellers directly), who will cover repairs, taxes etc. and it can be great for them to know that you would be taking care of the property as your own now (level of care) because you truly want to buy it at the end terms and exercise the right to purchase. 

@Michael Brown you will definitely need to walk the house to get any kind of reasonable estimate, if only as a learning exercise.  

If it's the latter I wouldn't lend money for this type of exercise unless it were for my own portfolio.