I've never gotten away with just cosmetics on the properties I've done in that age range.Couple other random comments:You won't be able to do a 1031 exchange as someone mentioned.How long are you planning to take - guessing your sale would hit the market during the unfavorable winter months?

It was not until recently (read: last week) that the light bulb went off in my head as I listened to random BP podcasts on my way to/from work. 

Most love talking about what they do, but maybe not so much to a random person on the phone.

I found BP when they sent me a random email.

You will want to give them a short run down and your contact info and they will forward it to there people, obviously people that have money don't want to have their info randomly given out.5.

The owners at the time did not alert me to the change in occupancy and I had to find out about this change on my own thru random inspections of my own.Going forward, with future deals where the units are occupied, what strategies should I utilize to help ensure that I'm not taken by surprise when tenants up and leave.  

So go network.There are a bunch of other scenarios where someone might walk through without the charge (call 20 guys and someone may bite for a free walk through and cost estimate), but it's up to you to develop that scenario and it's unlikely to be the random contractor called off of the internet.

And they will use the one in a million exception (usually a statically insignificant occurrence based on random"luck") to "prove' their case.  

That is why Forbes asked him to write an article and not some random joker on BP to write about caps instead.

Then landlords tried putting a cap on the utility bills, for example: anything over $300 tenant pays, but students didn't like it because they thought everything was included and now they're getting a random bill which they didn't budget into their expenses.