Maybe you can do that in CA and then start out-of-state investing in a more cash flow intensive market.

Ever the basketball enthusiast he played for Needham B.

Legal solutions are fact intensive, and only a local practitioner with access to all the facts could answer a legal question.

The market doesn't always go up, it can go down and has in the past.Smart leverage and risk tolerance matter a lot, someone wanting to retire early will have different goals than someone who already has their nest egg built and doesn't want to lose it.plus in those examples pretty tough these days to find 100k props that rent at 1k that are not management intensive and if its Texas tax's will be greater than 150 a month.. and then you have cap ex turn over etc etc.. what most landlords ONLY learn once they are in the deals is that houses dont run on proforma.. some may do quite well some can be alligators.

Seems like it would be very labor intensive.

Last year the biddings were very intense and you do not get any good deal or the reserve price is set at very high level. 

These investors focus on large, management-intensive projects and adjust price targets to reflect their changing cost of capital and future cash flow projections.

They already sound pretty management intensive (demanding, capricious), so I would personally select another party, all else being equal. 

Looking up and emailing the city on any restrictions.. seems like the process isn't as intense as I was thinking.  

That may sound pretty good...until you discover that their net worth is decreasing at a rate of $2 million per year, and they've got $100 mil of adjustable rate debt on a portfolio of D class properties that forces them to work 80+ hours per week just to keep the whole thing afloat...Investor B tells you "my net worth is $1 mil" --to many successful investors, that sounds like a relatively insignificant net worth...but, investor B owns a portfolio of A class properties with zero debt, professionally managed, their cashflow is $500k per year, their net worth is increasing at a rate of $1 mil per year, and they only have to work about 1-2 hours per week to keep their machine going.Personally, I'd MUCH rather be investor B than investor A (even though investor A's net worth is 10x of investor B's).So yeah, tracking net worth is advisable, but it's only a small part of what an investor should be tracking and modeling, and net worth alone might not be very indicative of an investor's success...An effective investor creates models to help them strategize, and those models inevitably include net worth, but they include a LOT more than just net worth (and as a result, they can be quite time-intensive to create)...but, the things that are most worth doing usually ain't easy...