I'd use it as a reference to double check your work.https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2010/06/3...I'm currently living in a duplex that I bought back in December, a good piece of advice I got, and it sounds like you are already doing it, is to pretend to pay yourself rent each month.  

Pretend you don't know the other person for legal purposes, because you really don't. 

I won't pretend to know how to improve your business I just know it also works with PPC even if the search volume says 0.

Basically, pretend that I over-invested on the front end.

Do these pretend buys for a while until you get comfortable running those numbers.I don't recommend buying a huge apartment building for your first deal.  

Let's pretend the value did not go up even $1 and you put $0 worth of capital improvements into it, so you sell property A for $275,000 and purchase property B for $500,000. 

I don’t pretend to be any kind of expert, but if someone wants to pay me an hourly or flat rate to drive out to a property and give my opinion with nothing else to gain then I’d do it.

It's in the path of progress and has room to build 15-20 houses, holding for appreciation and pretending to be a farmer sometimes.I have under contract a 3-2 house in a cheap market, the inspection brought to my attention additional problems and I'm trying to renegotiate it for 6 grand less (heat pump and electrical issues).

Or should I just let them know I’m the property manager and pretend like I’m not the owner?

So Even if you pretended to have 10K right now, all you needed was just a couple of 100 dollars to get going.