My Dad's suggestion was to "rent" the house from him, since until I have title there is nothing to prevent a parade of homeless squatters from moving in if I merely pay him to leave.

Keep it shady, everyone knows that insurance companies will go to any lengths and make policyholders jump through bizarre hoops to avoid paying out a full benefit.

Their presence in the calculators is merely to assure you will make a profit over time.

Generally, these losses can be deducted against future passive activity income from any passive activity source and not merely form the activity that created the loss(except for publicly traded partnership). 

The other person did not get my duplex, I merely ‘traded’ one property for another to avoid having a taxable event.

It made me re-read the FL statutes and I found I was wrong about OTC Florida tax liens; I somehow had read years ago that OTC liens were not eligible for the 5% premium.

If you have suspended losses because expenses exceed rental income and your rental activities are per se passive per IRC 469, then those suspended losses are not lost but merely get carried into future years, whereby they may offset income.

Funny how people on BP recommend all the time to buy a property that nets you a mere $100-$200 cash flow per month, but then just walk away from $6,000 that someone rightfully owes you. 

But, if my tenants want to leave early its just a mere one and half months rent break fee.

It's actually a pretty interesting phenomena known as the Endowment Effect whereby the mere act of owning something makes it more valuable to that particular individual (and no one else, unless there's celebrity status attached).