I'm not a home inspector, but I point out many items to the buyer, so the buyer enters into the purchase agreement with eyes wide open before spending money on a home inspector.

You’d gain tax deductions, and you’d relieve yourself or your parents of any additional work regarding reservations or repairs. 

You need to be able to come up with this really before you spend money on a civil for plans that tells you it won't work.

Without a financial education - it's hard for him to discern which.What he should NOT do is to buy toys or spend it on fun because it'll quickly be gone.If he was financially savvy or versed in real estate - he could even buy a small apartment complex and self manage it if he had some property management skills.Advice should be catered to him specifically though, blanket advice isn't that helpful.

You have consider that your average first time home buyer, has no clue how to read an LE, does not even know what fees are for what, and needs that additional assistance for them to feel comfortable purchasing their first property.

Quote from @Luis Maza: Hi all, returning to the game this year and would like to pick your brain a bit, we started working with a wholesaler that will send us properties here and there with the "wholesale" price, but every time we check the properties and add the numbers, the margins are, well, I am not sure, too low perhaps, maybe we are getting to picky, but this is my dilemma for example...Today we got a property, wholesale price 300K, rehab about 50-60K, ARV is about 440k, but with the cost of hard money, we have about 100k cash, hard money interest at 11%, keeping the property for 90 days while we finish the rehab, closing costs,  commissions, we ended with 30k profit before taxes, while it sounds appealing, adding up all expenses and cost we ended up expending 50K on rehab(labor/materials) and about 50-60K with cost of the loan, interest, commissions, etc, everyone makes money, happy with that, but it seems that we are working to produce a 100k for everyone else, while we make 20-30k if everything goes well...In my opinion, we are not really getting "wholesale" price, it seems that we either buying to expensive, rehabs are much more than we would like to spend and the cost of borrowing that money is too high...We came up with thoughts as: lets fund it ourselves with money from a close friend/partner that we will bring in, and that would save us 10-15k here and there, but still, is that the norm now?

If you see a need and you can fill that need why not add on additional income streams!

Sure there is a very small chance that something will go wrong, but with the tightening rental laws spending a little on a proper lease is smart.

The increase in vacancies can be attributed to the addition of new properties to the market and higher than usual vacancy rates in older properties.https://www.socalrha.org/news/2024-vacancy-and-rental-rate-s...Note LL, location, and property all have an impact on actual vacancy.  

But, excel is totally fine in the beginning (in addition to your PM software to capture transactions outside of the properties).We use QuickBooks Online exclusively for all of our REI Clients.