@Tom S. do you feel your investments have outweighed the desire for a home of your own in CA?  

That alone is enough to show that for this particular situation, real estate FAR outweighs anything the market can do.

There are some drawbacks to using it but the pros seem to outweigh the cons.

Because she knew so little, she was more afraid of the unknown, than any potential benefits could outweigh.

Its important to note that Storage also has some additional challenges that you wouldn't experience in MF but the advantages outweigh the drawbacks by a large margin in my opinion.  

I have decided to not pay off student loan upfront, since I figured that the rate of return on property outweigh student loan interest rate.

The cost of doing this likely far outweighs the tax benefits of personally owning rental property that you would gain.Leveraging the properties in the Solo 401k to create some liquidity for additional investments would likely be a better strategy, so long as the spread between what you are paying in interest on the non-recourse mortgage and the interest you can earn lending the money is sufficient.  

It's likely that the substantial value you add by increasing the number of bedrooms will outweigh the cost of increasing the size of the window.  

The protection you gain from a properly formed entity far outweighs the savings on interest rates.

Maybe next time I'll do a surprise visit but for now this works just fine for me, I don't see any outweighing advantages to the surprise visit.I gave my friend a list of about 4 things to check per property (photo or ask resident about history), 4 properties.