So they got what they wanted which was a chunk of cash up front and I got what I wanted which was a good return on my invested capital.The seller had a recent appraisal on the building so I offered them a bit less than the appraised value and we worked out a rent that is comparable /sq ft to similar properties in town.The seller gave me yearly rental increases and I gave him the option to buy the property back from me any time during the 5 year lease term because that was important to him.One of those classic win-win deals.

Putting capital into negatively cash-flowing property in the Bay Area seems borderline irresponsible to me (unless you were doing some kind of re-development or re-purposing, as you allude to).

I'm Andrew Geib, currently I'm working as a lean six sigma engineer based in the Aurora/Naperville area. 1) Favorite real estate book: just picked up Rich Dad Poor Dad for the first time2) Favorite non-real estate book: Freakonomics3) Advice for new investors: seeing as I am a new to real estate, get started now rather than later. 4) Hobbies: cars, I autocross my daily driver whenever I can, I'm resorting a classic mustang, and I frequently go to car shows all across Chicagoland. 

We had a tenant with pretty bad credit but they had a paid off classic car (I'm from the motor city, this is normal :) ).  

The building looks like a classic value add, lots of differed maintenance on the outside of the building.

@Jay Helms Napoleon Hill wrote about both these in his classics book, Think and Grow Rich.

After driving by this FSBO (classic red and white sign in the yard) 15-20 times on my way to the jobsite, we finally looked into it and saw it was a double.

The list of issues in EC are long and classic.

I have read the classic books of kiyosaki as well as the e-myth.

It was a classic good sized Cape Cod, (a design I still hate).