Let me tell the short version of the tail....I bought a single family in Taunton in 2008 with the mindset of fixing it and upgrading 5 years later...

The title isn't really correct, you work your tail off early on to reap future benefits, you just forget how hard you worked when you began. 

Sifting through the mountains of information offered by the likes of BP, trying to make heads or tails of the incongruous data on sites like foreclosures.com, putting together my property screener, etc.  

We got about $1000/mo per room for the first month and then it started to tail off.

I am not opposed to 60 hour weeks, as long as I can move those hours around as needed (emergencies happen, but I feel like I'm doing it wrong if I can't plan 95% of my time).So here's the bright eyed, bushy tailed plan of a newbie:1.

If that is not the case where you are then your risk profile will look a lot tougher on the tail ends (scenarios that seldom happen such as volcano erupting) and you will want to price that in.

As you can tell, I am fairly new to ground-up development so I do want to mitigate as much risk as possible, especially given the 10 year liability tail on SFR construction in California.  

I would also find someone who is currently doing the task you are wanting to do and pull his or her coat tail for information.

Is there a procedure that I can pull her coat tail too?

We all have marketing costs, overhead, and personal expenses so referring notes to “earn a living” or a cash fee at closing makes good sense.It also provides the marketing machine to generate leads that can be matched with an institutional investor, a partial investor with tail-end opportunities, or your own portfolio.