You also will not be able to see the house and no one should buy sight unseen without a history of doing it.If you are talking about Auction dot com or Xome or Hubzu, those come with a buyer's premium on top of the sale price between 5-10% and often have ghost bidders in the system so you will see it keep getting reset to hit a higher bottom.As a new(er) investor, auctions are where you go to lose money and take on excessive risk.

I simply thought putting it out there in the Forum might keep someone from unknowingly buying something that might leave you out to dry.

I'm not saying you weren't, but I know architects and engineers, if they get a feeling that a client doesn't really know what they want and will need an excessive amount of hand holding and doing several redesigns through the process, they will pad their numbers.

You are a local investor with a couple properties, not a conglomerate, and you are looking to get one more and the open market is dry.

I have a primarily stay-at-home job with excessive free time. 

Prior comment of getting 15% in these investments - honestly I don’t see it because of the burden of the overhead to deal with small dollar investors.We started our fund At $500 and quickly bumped it up to now it’s $5,000 because of the costs of dealing with these small dollar investors was to excessive.

(And let the excess basis be depreciated over 27.5 or 39 years, as is typically done on real estate without a cost seg.)About @Sang Ji's question "can you do the cost segregation for the new apartment complex you buy through 1031 exchange". 

They rolled over on a deal that was pretty cut and dry in my opinion, and really let me and my client down after months of dredging through paperwork and underwriting. 

I follow a checklist in order to get rental properties up a certain standard: - The interior and exterior paint should be free of excessive wear, smudges/dirt and preferably in neutral colors.

How do folks make the ceiling dry and fix it?