No one can see the future, so who knows what the next 5-10 years will bring.10% Is not an extraordinary return, but not bad either.

@Justin JohnsonYou need money to get money (leverage) - having an fha mortgage did you put 3% down.Until you get 20%+ down it’s going to be more complex to get leverage and I would argue even if you could get leverage borrowing money with no reserves is a very bad idea

I refinanced the $300K mortgages keeping it at $300K increasing my cash flow by more than $18K/year.The good news is 1993 was a bad year and there are pages and pages of RE auctions.

That being said the leads typically are not the problem (sometimes the leads are bad), it's the conversation to converts the leads.

Free or discounted stays by friends and family count as "bad" personal use.

The meaningful relationships are earned by being a trusted advisor  who provides accurate information even if it means your client will be less competitive on that particular opportunity compared to the buyer who arrives at their purchase number based on bad advice. 

Appraisals have to be done at an "arms length" from the bank, meaning the bank can't influence the value.

But here are some really interesting numbers...Ok so this one doesn't look too bad but notice how much more the townhouses and condos dropped in prices over the last downturn.2007 peak to now isn't so good...Before the 2007 run up to now is better, but even then, apartment condos performed the worse (so best case scenario, you have the worse performing asset type, worse case scenario you had a terrible return), and that's assuming you had nothing go wrong with the condo (special assessment etc)But benchmarks don't even tell the whole story, because if you had a specific condo investment, and you tracked it's value overtime, benchmark prices isn't the right approach as it evolves overtime (benchmark price is the price of a typical property generated at each point in time).

I believe these posts are influenced by the pay for education syndication model.

The first year is probably the most crucial year, as you will need to calculate the cost basis in your rental properties, which will influence your depreciation expense on Schedule E.