Most important is getting a RE knowledgeable CPA who knows to outsource the calculation-intensive work involved in a quality engineering-based cost segregation study.  

If you don't know what you're looking at, have a competent contractor or even better a competent structural engineer take a look at it for you. 

I'm eager to network with fellow investors both locally and beyond, and I'm ready to grow my real estate portfolio with the support of the BiggerPockets community.When I’m not delving into real estate, I work as a Cloud Engineer at Lockheed Martin, fully embracing my IT roots.

@Neil Narayan   it will be interesting to see how many space engineers and rocket scientist will move from Hawthorn to Boca Chica which is nowhere near Austin. 

I'm currently helping an E5 engineer with a house hack in the college area out here in San Diego. 

Those types of syndications (such as Cardone) are typically very aggressively underwritten (meaning higher execution risk), have sponsors who don't have full real estate cycle experience (meaning higher sponsor risk), have higher leverage ( meaning higher risk of default or suspended distributions), use floating rate loans ( meaning higher interest rate risk), have short-term debt ( meaning higher refinance risk), use financial engineering (meaning higher risk of missing the pro forma), lack signficant (or any) skin in the game (meaning higher risk of lack of alignment with conservative investors ). etc.And it's 100% true that most of these are struggling now.

Utilities, site upgrades, engineering?

Contact a local civil engineering firm , they know all the players .

If buying a condo research the HOA health, engineering study, last 5 years of HOA board and meeting minutes and last three years of HOA financials/reserves. 

For furnishing short- or mid-term rentals, finding the right balance between stuff that looks good, but which also offers solid durability and keeps your budget in check can be difficult.If your budget is your driving factor with your design decisions, I'd start surfing on Google image search or Pinterest - find a picture of a finished room that you like, and then reverse engineer it from products on Amazon and other similar budget-friendly sources.