Spend your time and money learning how to avoid that kind of situation rather than learning from on the job training.

Can you spend money on a CRM, automations, VA calling service, a VOIP phone system, etc?

Spend a year learning and going to meetups before you fork over a $50-$100k franchise fee and half of your profits and don't even know what you are doing.

If your time is worth $500 an hour I would spend the 5k on 10 hours of searching for a free mentor.

@Chris Lin,Thank you very much for spending time with me on the phone last night. 

Or, ya know, just spend the next 140 hours trying to get a self-study law education followed by another few hundred hours self-study to sort out how to avoid repeating the situation.That's the reality of it all. 

Thank you all who responded, I plan on spending some time driving the neighborhood and talking to anyone at the local coffee shop who will talk to me. 

More difficult after spending money on a rehab, but it might be worth an appointment with an attorney.  

thanks for your time and help rent to retirement works directly with build to rent developers like us around the country once they are framed up. you are buying properties pretty much at market value but with a hand holding. you can work directly with a builder or directly with them. they are just an intermediary. they take 5% on what we make as a builder but have a large list of investors and a systemized approach to selling new builds. if you want to get a better deal I'd recommend directly contacting builders and building it yourself. fly to the market. spend 2 days, tour new builds, get a feeling for how it's going. if your builder isn't building multiple at a time then I wouldn't recommend working with them. rent to retirement is a well oiled and well run machine. they've had their ups and downs with dozens of transactions in florida but modified their process. they are well known and established and transparent. if you have a more specific market and feel confident in your ability to vet deals try it out. happy to talk more my info is in my signature. we work directly with them to sell new builds and no organization is perfect but I have good things to say about them as a builder and potential build to rent developer that sells build to rent triplexes and single family homes through them to end buyers in California like the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego 

Most can't even conceive how they will ever have just $200,000 sitting around in liquid cash to spend.