While not everything will translate to every city many of the concepts will help. 

Cap rates are useful for brokers or lenders who need a frame of reference to compare their hundreds of similar deals but for you as an investor, cap rates are meaningless.Predicting your future cap rate at sale is near impossible and any amount of value-add you inject into the asset will drastically alter the NOI.The safest thing you can do is to assume that the market will continue to worsen as you hold an asset.

Brian Burke: We've kept the waterfall structure the same.You can see here.We used in this case, We used in this case, we used an 8% preferred return, and then we had three waterfall hurdle tears.The investors got 70% to 12 60% to 15.And then after 15, they got 50 50.And we've essentially I've been using this waterfall almost since I started way back in the beginning.Every once in a while, we might alter something here or there because we feel the need to.But too many times I've done that and been completely wrong.We had a deal that we did about three years ago where when we underwrote the deal, I felt that we needed to juice thereturn a little bit more.And so we switched the waterfall to an 80 70 60 instead of 70 60 50.And at the end of the day, when we sold that property, we delivered to our investors like a 32% IRR.And now I'm kicking myself like we really didn't need to do that.We could have left it.Just as this waterfall is here, our investors would have got a 28 IRR or whatever and been thrilled to death.So I tend to leave the waterfall alone most of the time.

Only headache I have found at all is when I pay off a loan, it kind of disappears and I don't get the full line item register list of transactions on a close/paid off loan, SO to cheat the system, I alter my last transaction to leave $1 owing in the account to keep it alive. 

Remember high cap rate on paper does not always translate to a higher total return or even a positive return. 

They think they got someone willing to sell their house for cash, that that automatically translates to a motivated seller.

That is my suspicion too Mitch...perhaps something got lost in translation with the OP too.He talked to my attorney today and apparently he recommended an affidavit of sorts though and I am wondering why.

-----What is the translation here?

Its important to seperate business and personal relationships, and sometimes I think this is what gets lost in translation when it comes to family or friends.

These more recent purchases are generating profits, but the depreciation write offs translate into a net loss for tax purposes.