Could someone explain that to me or if there’s anyway to deduct those expenses.Not sure how we can explain it, because you already included an explanation in your question.

The agent "worked" for 2 hours at the most including drive time to the closing.

Red flags for me include people who are overly optimistic without considering risks or those who don’t seem to have a clear plan for their contributions to the partnership.

I just bought my first rental property in Baltimore, MD, and I’m planning to rent it out by the room, including the basement.

After conducting thorough due diligence, including a professional inspection and market analysis, the property was acquired for $72,000.Renovation and TransformationThe renovation aimed to modernize the property, enhance its appeal to potential tenants, and maximize its long-term value.

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.

Best thing to do is avoid the higher DTI debt to income, claim one as investment and use the rents to offset the new purchase. 

It’s still a worthy strategy to force cash flow that’s rare to find in SoCal, especially if you can reduce the cost of construction by doing a conversion/using an ADU grant or even buying a property with an existing ADU In general, even if the ADU valuation matches your cost including grants, they are usually not worth it in southern CA in single family zones. 

What I take some issue with is the techniques that guru's use to up sell and so on .. and they do nothing to qualify if the person paying them if the program does not work they are now into debt to the eyeballs and so on but then again who are we to say at some point.. think of  Hewlet and Packard they went into 15k worth of debt to start HP in late 40s or early 50s and that was a ton of money then :)

His reason was the only thing he knew to do with the proceeds was to loan it back out at 12%, and he would be "behind" where he is now in cashflow.His proceeds would have given him options up to and including PE, but he is a simple man and in his case holding was the option for now.