Also if your tenant makes a habit of being late, you might want to consider becoming firm on the rules or get better tenants.

IRS states you must and your spouse must have co-habitated in order to receive the exemption, although it clarifies that you didn't need to be married at the time of co-habitation if you married after.

They are acting as an agent without the laws, ethics requirements, education, and insurance that are vital IMO.

How vital is it to get a mentor for an amateur wholesale investor?

These are other very important pieces of the overall pie to consider sooner than later.The long and the short of it is that you have a huge number of options to create and build wealth based on your frugal life style and saving habits.  

We have turned renters into buyers through not only credit repair, but we also build credit and provide credit education so they hopefully don't fall back into their old habits.

If it is not habitable then you will possibly have to work with the city inspectors to get another certificate of occupancy. 

Do the bare minimum to keep the place habitable and do not renew their lease when it comes time.

A good habit to get into is all of the large commercial firms, JLL, Cushman, CBRE, Avison release market reports each quarter and has a lot of information on what happened the past quarter and some perspective of what is coming.  

It really takes some extra effort to make spaces habitable that were not orignally intended to be habitable.