My last CPA charged me 10k for a service that I could have easily gotten for 3k.

My market is Durham, NC and I'm sure many cities have intricacies that out of state investors could easily miss.

The trust part can be hard b/c you're not able to check on the properties as easily but that's part of building long term business relationships.  

Just make sure they allow rentals and that you can sell it easily if that ever should change. 

I could easily do a HLOC or Home Equity Loan, or Cash out refinance.

I have no idea how you make money with $900/month rent on a unit but can easily see making money on $500/month on a workshop.- much quicker.  

This is very enticing after seeing what we would roughly owe on the monthly mortgage even if we are conservative and say we will only make $1,000 a month income from the MIL suite (I think we could easily get $1,500).

If they were hired by you, they should be able to navigate you out of this situation fairly easily.

On the management side easily I get exponential quality and have been able to move my management into a proactive phase rather than reactive (I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off my first two years in real estate!)

I can’t tell you the exact price per sf, but generally, I’d pay about 10-20k for just drywall, carpet, doors etc in an unfinished basement, if you have any minor  foundation issues/leak that’s probably another 5-10k adding a bathroom is probably in the 8-10k range maybe a little more if you have no drain stack in the basement, digging down can easily be 50-100k