I only invested a fraction of what I would for a Bay Area property and for arguments sake say they are worth the same as my friends condo (about $500K).

There are a lot of ways you can buy cheap homes, but we only buy a fraction of the available inventory in order to stick to our strict criteria.

If you only have a small amount of money to loan you might instead consider participating locally in a fractionalized loan.Fractionalized loans are typically for larger dollars and include several individuals as lenders on one note.

What I mean being synical-checkout Wikipedia on Centralized Fractional Banking.  

Yes @William Hochstedler I agree mostly, and yes a decimal can be shown as a fraction, in relation to the whole.I understand that some of my posts need to be read several times to be digested and understood, I'm working on that.

Let's be honest, it's only a matter of time before a company like Zillow starts offering nationwide a full suite of products including PM services, at a fraction of your cost, and puts many of you out of business.

It looks AMAZING -- but only a small fraction of that yield is guaranteed (about equivalent to keeping your money in an online savings account), and an index fund will perform better over thirty years.

The debt treadmill and fractional reserve banking keeps the rather dysfunctional system going.

@Santos Gloria, If it gives you any encouragement, my 4 rental units only replaced a small fraction of my monthly income from my former corporate job.

We also used a home equity loan AND a HELOC in 2007 to buy two pieces of land that are now worth a fraction of what we paid for them.