If they are reputable and exercise their duties of Loyalty, Care, Accountability etc. their connections are meaningless.Meaning, they are working for you and should have your best interests in mind.  

Some of my LOs have escalating prices the further out the exercise happens, but I define the amount.  

I am talking new as in I have just this last weekend gotten my first property under contract and I am waiting for inspections to be done to make sure I don't need to exercise my option clause. 

Sure, you could go through the exercise and try to chart out the variables of income, taxes, appreciation, recapture of depreciation at the time of sale, time value of money, length of time holding an asset, etc., and you would get different answers in favor of one kind of money or the other depending on the input variables.... but what does that really tell you?

Hi John,Without really knowing what you are trying to do it is a wasted exercise to discuss which tenants give a corporate guarantee.Pharmacies most have flat rent in the primary term of the lease.

@Login George Once a new investor gets familiar with running numbers on properties which becomes pretty easy after repeatedly going through the exercise of doing so, they begin to learn that the dealing with people part of the business is really the challenging part.Investors can find a million spreadsheets that will run numbers for them, but I do not know of a definitive handbook on how to deal with people. 

An exercise for the readers is to check your local areas over the past decade.

Haha, that is a good exercise for your kids to practice handwriting!

that stuff was bulletproof and I think I have a couple of rooms left in my property portfolio, it won't die, like Methusela flooring--Cap Ex be damned... ) Similarly, the more I learn about concrete, I can mix and cure it to last longer than I can ever expect to live (again useful life be damned)... and if you are patch, repair, OCD maintenance landlord, you can cheat it some extending the useful life of many items (though you could argue the labor and repair is the input of the Cap Ex money, but mostly my own elbow grease, and I get some exercise to boot)...

Understand that mediation has no teeth, it's simply an exercise where the parties come together, and a mediator tries to get them to come to an agreement.