You can purchase for 50K in Sac and rent out for $800/mo not fantastic but good enough when you have a few.

After the complete futility of the 1990's, after the "almost good enough" of the 2000's, after getting so close in 2006 vs.

Also living in Bay Area, just saving the time and money for using HOV lanes is good enough incentive for me to go for any EV.

Find a good enough deal that if you had to sell it, you could get all your original cash.

But that apparently wasn't good enough for my FRIEND.

Well, yes it is, but its the cost of doing business if you don't have any other alternatives, so build the costs into the deal and make sure the deal is good enough, then you should be fine.

For me 8-9% cocroi (after vacancy, repairs, cap ex, management) is good enough considering that I'm doing very little to no work in the process. 

I had the printed copy and the app which was good enough.

IMHO just good jobs is not good enough, there needs to be growing jobs. 

There is no way they would give a 30k deposit to a contractor without certain protections written down on paper.If the contractor objects to this arrangement because he has to front the first 20% of the costs, it may be an indicator that his credit is not good enough to support normal short-term operating expenses.