Hi Shawn-Congratulations on starting out on your real estate investing career.You have a question about whether it is good to have your real estate license or not as an investor and you are leaning toward multifamily investing.I personally think having your real estate license is helpful as an investor.Having your real estate license allows you to work with other investors to help them build their portfolios which helps expand your network while being productive, you can research market value more effectively, find out about deals before they are listed, and of course it allows you to collect the commission on purchasing any listed property.To Your Success!

@Rickie LattimoreGive up 95% of the equity - oversee the properties and collect a management fee.

If you catch these at the pre-foreclosure stage as slow pays or initially in default all the better as the bank has less in collection expense.You can still work out a discount but even buying at the payoff it can be profitable depending on the property value.You can practically force a lender to sell as it can fully indemnify them as a full payoff as demanded, continuing with a foreclosure becomes a rather vengeful act by the bank to punish a borrower, they don't want to go there.

In my opinion, Maverick and Hipster in good faith could have done more because Maverick had referred us to ABC Baltimore (and Hipster had connected us to Maverick).

Sometimes maybe often times they aren't doing enough to track down the owner or owner's heirs and just collecting checks from the court.

Simultaneously, develop a detailed scope of work and collect bids from multiple contractors to compare costs and timelines.

If you don't want the property any more a 1031 is probably your best bet, unless it's got a huge capital gains capture in which case you could just take your tax lumps and collect your funds. 

Also, focus on 2 years of job/income stability.Class D Properties:Cashflow vs Appreciation: Typically, all cashflow with little, maybe even negative, relative rent & value appreciationVacancy Est: 20%+ should be used to cover nonpayment, evictions & damages.Tenant Pool: majority will have FICO scores under 560 (almost 30% probability of default), little to no good tradelines, lots of collections & chargeoffs, recent evictions.

If you choose not to show up, he would almost certainly be awarded a judgement.Of course, you could choose not to pay the judgement, but then he can send it to a collections agency and your credit score will be trashed.I don't see a scenario here where you get through this cleanly.  

I should note that that I was using Baselane's banking service to collect deposit and rent, and had moved the funds immediately to my private bank after I collected (thank god!).