I've had a couple of SF rentals with pools. 

I would recommend finding some local meetups to attend, and also tuning into the Straight Up Chicago Investor's Podcast.

That's pretty important if rates were to decrease in the next couple of years.2.

Call up a couple companies.

(A couple weeks for 1 property every year or two?

As we have all seen, Californians are leaving in droves over the past couple of years, and fleeing to Florida, Texas and yep...Arizona.As long as we continue to stay under LAs housing market for affordability, we are going to continue to net those homeowners wanting an upgrade to a bigger house or lot. 

A couple of months ago, I purchased a property using a hard money loan for $115,000.

If you sell it now (or within a couple of years), you won't have to pay that. 

So I clicked post a couple more times trying to get it to work.

If neighbor says they own it I would tell them I plan to construct a new one next to it on my property line even if I needed to lose a couple of feet of yard.