Bid on the merits of the lot, period.

As to the idea of you living in the garage apartment and renting out the house, you do set yourself up to merit a higher rent payment for renting out the house.

It may have some merit down the road, if building the infrastructure to do something like this supports the validity of having scaled something to that level, which then can be used for multiple purposes, including but not limited to locating the best buy & hold assets.

If they are great deals in a market where we are looking, we can pay assignment fees once we figure out the merit of the deal. 

As far as actual track record/technical merit/history goes, I don't know much more than that--however at the meetup talk they tried to be as conservative with their numbers as possible which I found attractive (as opposed to hyping things up and pretending REI is some overnight venture).I also think Memphis Cash Flow mentioned Marathon property management as a good go-to sister company for managing properties--do you know of others that also reputable?

They know that multi-families appeal to investors so they're doing whatever they can to keep people in the door and sell the property, even if that means that the "tremendous upside" in rents doesn't have a lot of merit.

- Will a signed affidavit from the siblings have any legal merit whatsoever, allowing them to sign off on the sale of the property? 

In the SECs own words 'all non-accredited investors, either alone or with a purchaser representative, must meet the legal standard of having sufficient knowledge and experience in financial and business matters to be capable of evaluating the merits and risks of the prospective investment'.

I saw a foreign guy writing about how insular western Pennsylvania is and a number of people treating what he said like it had zero merit, and I felt compelled to mention that I've had a good taste of how racist and xenophobic western Pennsylvania is recently, after all, this neo-Nazi just shot up a synagogue here last October.And then you pop up from nowhere (well, Allentown in eastern Pennsylvania) and start repeatedly telling me to calm down and not turn this into a thread about racism and xenophobia and this board's for real estate investing and I should stick to that.

Several, including myself, stepped forward and supported the proposition that there are legitimate merits to the program.