By installing our own, we remove the wear and tear and damage the tenants do by moving W/Ds in and out and hooking them up wrong (which is common) and using cheap components that cause leaks and destroy floors and walls.

Purchase price: $179,000 Cash invested: $15,000 Lived in the property for 1 year.Knocked down living room wall, replaced Hvac, floors and gutted and remodeled the kitchen, attic insulation, converted the living room and the dining area into rooms.

Quote from @Henry Lazerow:My guess is most of the deals selling go to newbies who have no idea what a rehab really costs or that once you open the walls the costs often go up 10's of thousands so you need a solid margin to make money. 

Welcome to the world of re-opening the walls to show your plumbing and electric work.

Also, have you made any significant alterations to the property or if it were put on the market today, would it be indistinguishable from a standard 4-bedoom house (are there any extra walls for the SRO, constructed locks/barriers etc.)If its a standard SFR and the leases are very short term - there is a path that you could refinance this with a DSCR as basically a Short Term Rental and then potentially change strategic course back to SRO if needed at a later date

Replaced the carpet with hardwood floors & new trim, painted all the walls, and completely renovated the bathroom What was the outcome?

Second, the building code, IRC/IBC, defines a townhouse as zero lot line (zero setback) homes that are on their own separate parcels and share a common wall.

Break down your rehab into individual jobs, for example get a electrician for electrical work, a plumber to repipe the house, a dry wall guy to close out the walls, etc.

@Sandee SampsonA construction attorney would be who to contact but you are going to spend a lot more than $7000 in getting this resolved against a builder.Also let’s say you win, the courts could also say you didn’t pay for a retaining wall which is needed so it’s a betterment to the property so you would still need to pay for the wall and they would be responsible for some soil etc.

I then spent a majority of my free time learning as much as I could on the different styles and strategies that have been utilized in the past, reading everything from Lynch’s One Up on Wall Street to Graham’s Security Analysis, to learning how to build out financial models in excel.