The issue with watering your foundation is that you have to do it always, every year without a break in order to achieve the desired effect.

Quote from @Devin James: In one of our development projects, the City staff asked us to remove 40 units from our concept plan.This wasn’t requested by the City Commission at a formal hearing, it was the opinion of the staff.Our original concept already proposed fewer units than the current zoning would have allowed.Here’s what erasing 40 units means:- 40 fewer homes for buyers- Over $1M in lost profit for our team- Fewer tax dollars and impact fees that could’ve benefited the City’s infrastructure & servicesWe gotta get betterEveryone wants more affordable housing, but not everyone wants to do what it takes to achieve it we never listen to the recommending bodies. we move for city approvals and work closely. the other thing we do is keep going back to the same groups over and over and over and over every month on the same agenda and make very small reductions like 2% or 4% and that reduces and beats them down eventually they accept what you want. it's just before beating a dead horse. we keep tabling until they give us something we all agree on then we go to vote. in our city in columbus we have to get recommendations but that's our strategy. we used to come out as aggressive as possible. we typically study developments in the area and keep it very similar in terms of density. we have a track record of very controversial projects and litigation and not taking no as an answer. after a year of that haha I can tell you it's not worth it. now we are more relationship based and buying the right kinds of plots of land. if the numbers don't work on the front end don't do the development. 

What checks and balances would you need to put in place to avoid this.I am a firm believer that you should tie any bonus to a metric that the company is trying to achieve.

Others focus on achieving a profit of at least 10%-15% of the ARV (After Repair Value).

Real estate offers a more likelihood to achieve wealth compared to anything else.

Don't be fooled by the promised returns - these likely won't be achieved in such an area due to delinquency and more-than-expected maintenance and cap ex.

It's just going to be harder than you thought and will take longer than you expected to reach the level of success that you likely aspire to achieve. 

There are other, more ambitious, risky, and difficult, ways you could achieve the same end goal.

Me purchasing it and renting it out to her turns it into an investment property thatvallows me to take advantage of all the tax benefits that come with it.She may lose the primary residence mortgage benefits she has, but I think what we achieve with the conversion outweighs the loss.Cashflow would be immediate and allow for quick savings growth for the next purchase.

If you can rehab and refinance (BRRRR) to extract all investment and achieve neutral cash flow you would have infinite return (most of my RE investments have achieved infinite return but the cash neutral has in particular gotten a lot more challenging when the rates rose starting Q2 of 2022).Any money extracted via a refinance is tax deferred.