There are a lot of strikes against you at present.

A small rural town 30 minutes from Rochester does not strike me as a great place to build new rental units.

However, I would personally like to house hack a duplex while building up the house fund even more to strike on a forever home a year or 2 while living in the duplex. 

It turned out there rents were way below market, which was a strike against it, and the back of the barn, where I wanted to put an artist's studio for myself, was in need of renovation. 

That strikes a nice balance between keeping it cost effective but nice.3.

I was really hoping a great deal like this would be able to help me out on the back end of it of even if I strike out then they will get the property.Talked to one lender this morning and he said he would prefer 20% but have seen where 15% down is done. 

The reason for an attorney is mostly asset protection.I want a guy to help direct moving from a personal loan to an LLC and advise all avenues to help protect me.Lastly, my wife and I are both high income earners and should disaster strike via bankruptcy, lawsuit, etc I want to limit her exposure as much as possible.Out of curiosity chinmay did you go to penn state?

What strikes me is that I would have sworn that these were just rental areas, but then I see quite a few high dollar retail sales occurring on rehabbed houses in the immediate area, and so I'm looking at a couple of them as possible flips now.In some of these lower areas, if you do a very nice rehab, your buyer can tap into targeted down payment assistance programs made available by the city/county/state, or sometimes even a HUD program.

I'm not saying you can't strike out on your own and start your real estate career right this very minute.

I'm interested in discussing a full time or part time partnership (or some variation thereof) with a resident of the area, if anyone is interested; it strikes me that two motivated beginners may be better than one, especially in terms of mutual motivation and establishing (and then exceeding) comfort zones.