Essentially, I own 1% of a piece of land there that RAD plans on developing over the next few years.

Just make sure all pieces are accounted for regularly.

There are alot of real estate strategy out there which will allow you to obtain a piece of property unconventionally. 

$1,000 for the appraisal of 100k investment piece gotta love it !  

That will be an important piece to this depending on how you plan to source your capital.

The end goal is to have a piece of land with multiple houses: one for my growing family but also a home for my mother in law.My mother in law has agreed to foot the money on a new property/land up front and when ready we can buy land from her to build/develop etc. 

While both involve finding and properly securing a site and bringing it to full entitlement, the ground-up process includes the land piece but gets way more involved and complex to execute.The full "Monty" for ground-up development needs to include financial literacy, an explanation of metrics, and how they work.

Make those connections first.I know you want to take advantage of a great opportunity in your lending terms but that's only a piece of the pie when it comes to success in real estate.  

You also want to think–and this is perhaps the most important piece–how will this particular laundromat fit into your life?

I can hardly believe an accountant would say such a thing unless there are pieces of the story that aren't in the post.