@Shane B.Selling primary residence = potential tax savings through section 121 exclusion($250,000/$500,000 of gain excluded).Holding new multi-family unit in LLC = expenses related to the vacant unit will not be deductible if you plan to use it for yourself.An attorney can provide guidance of liability protection from owning the property in an LLC.

@Josh Levan I think the best approach is not to focus on any one particular area but to start by excluding the rough areas and then look at each deal on it's own.

My ultimate goal is to stay local but I am not excluding any opportunities for my financial goals.

We all know that when posting real estate for sale on craigslist you must specify for sale by broker or for sale by owner. So when searching for craigslist is there a filter to differentiate between these two posts?

If it gets to day 61, most policies will reduce coverage and exclude coverage for things like Theft or frozen pipes, etc.

Some people still like to include a reserve for property management just in case they plan to outsource the management later on but for now if you're self managing I would exclude PM (especially because it already seems the numbers are tight).

I understand there is an annual exclusion amount for gifts, but if you are under the lifetime unified credit amount, are you excluded from a gift tax?

@Mike Lofton - being conservative with the numbers and excluding the cost of money (because I don't know your situation), I think you hold 3 winning hands.

I'm not sure why investment property was excluded from the investment tax credit back in 2006, but it was, leaving us with leasing as the best option for our rentals, which is why not many investors put solar on their rentals. 

We recently purchased Buildium for our property management software, and the software includes a rental application that I can customize which fields to include/exclude.