But if you feel that by painting the exterior you can raise rents, then I would expend the capital for painting.  

I do have some expendable income and a few family investors willing to put up cash to get started.

So don't expend much energy until you know that.Second, If you are not confident of your ability to do the deal, I would certainly bring in a partner.

In that case you should seek a reasonable termination of the agreement recognizing that the agent may have expended a good deal of time working for you. 

Now, here are the major differences; they are not a factor in your loan to value ratio, as well as, they are not calculated in your monthly expendes, which is huge!

the 2nd association it resonates is the highly consumption-driven society we live in. in my area (coastal, urban southern california) i'm surrounded by 2 distinct lifestyles. there's the majority: seems like 95% of the local population who are renters, driving luxury cars, sporting fancy clothes, jewelry, hairdos, etc but obviously living paycheck to paycheck as exemplified by hardly a day somebody or the other is spotted  getting their car repo'ed by a camera crew. the rarer are the landlords, who in this area seem to be of mostly asian demographics (chinese, koreans, japanese) who live obviously very frugally: old 80s model sedan, oldfashion business cloths, always eating simple meal from home, seemingly never splurging $$$ other than into expanding their portfolio), my observance is relatively very few landlords in the area own relatively huge portfolios, each.with the advent of these infomercials and the internet (ie, BP) more and more people want to get a 'piece of the REI pie' and more power to them. there does seem to be this dream of rags to riches and while its ok to dream, do most people actually expect their life to turn around like that, as portrayed in most of the infomercials or even in the everyday setting where the masses living paycheck to paycheck, are spending their last expendable dollars not on depositing into savings acount, but blowing $20 on scratchies etc. in summary, is my observation reminds me of my days when i worked on wall st and the 'ra trace' was so obvious with dime a dozen stock brokers makin 6fig salaries at some point but blowing it on recreational drugs apparently costing thousands of dollars a pop to the point the next week they are broke again and that $ wasnt invested but wasted.  

That is, if I don't have the right resources and time to expend to get the desired result, then it probably isn't appropriate for me to pursue that path.)Now of course my "business advisor" is telling me that I didn't do the course right, because I didn't pre-screen the 1,501 properties to make sure they were in livable condition before making my offer.That way I don't fit the criteria for a full refund per the 12-month $12,000 guarantee and have to pay the 10% restocking fee for the 30-day return policy.So that's why I want to find out what the true experiences of members who have purchased Rob Swanson's course is before plunging in and spending another $997.

You need to determine your goals for wealth and/or cash flow, time frame to meet those goals, effort your are willing to expend and your risk tolerance to determine the best way to allocate your funds. 

If your budget allows, you may want to expend to a couple more zip codes.

I also have probably $35k in expendable assets- $20k of which I could liquidate with one phone call but this particular loan officers doesn't seem to care about any of that!