It would be extremely wise to have an attorney involved through the entire process.

There is a great possibility there are some costly problems lurking.You may be wise to look for another investment opportunity.

What Karen Mikolainis said - if you put it all down into a spreadsheet, I think you may find that renting where you NEED to live and investing where you WANT to may make the best sense - and will more than cover up the need to pay for the services of a good property manager and others - if you follow the deals to where the money is.Also, being remote will free you from being emotionally and time-wise consumed in management of your property/ies.I second that.

Paperwork wise, you would typically have a promissory note and a deed of trust, mortgage or whatever security instrument is used in your state.

But learning is truly invaluable and I own the house outright so really just the taxes/utilities are adding on (Note: Not more than the money saved for doing it myself, so budget wise - still ahead).Tomorrow I should be posting "before" pictures as well as "current" pictures to give an idea of what has been done.Basically we have:Demo-ed kitchen, upstairs bathroom, flooring.Sheetrocked/taped/spackled/painted.Re-sided the entire house.

What requirements time wise need to be met?

For a novice to try to rehab a house that was built in the 1900's wouldn't be a wise move, in my opinion.

I think it is a wise idea to get a traditional mortgage before rates increase as they are projected to in the first quarter of 2014.

Percentage wise, I've took bigger losses to escape from a bad deal.

We did get a 5th, however, they required 25% down (some say it's now 30% down 6-10 from what I've read here), higher credit score, higher reserves (6 months on all properties, I believe), and be prepared to jump through many hoops documentation-wise.