The architect will draw it, then the engineer stamps his approval on it.So to recap - in my experience, an architect will save you time, money, frustration, and lost building time.

It frustrates me how some of these guys denitgrate "jobs" while at the same time advocating you take up a different job.OTOH, there are couple of good underlying ideas here.

So if you purchase a property could you afford to pay the mortgage until you find good tenants??

The reason they are looking at my place instead is price, they can't afford more, they don't get more.Everything has it's place, you just need to know your market.

Couldn't I negotiate wit the bank too buy their performing note and wholesale it to a note buyer, then the note buyer could work out the mortgage payments to make them more affordable?

It is my goal to turn this into a rental (it can rent for $950/month) as soon as we can afford to move up to a nicer place in the city (we are out of town, in a great area for rentals but it's just a bit too far out).

This is extremely frustrating when the buyer knows about the needed repairs, and the property is priced accordingly.

What you can afford has more to do with interest rates & taxes in the area than what your yearly pay is.

I do have each person on the lease.The type of tenant base this is however is that say a mother,son and daughter live there.Her sister approaches the mother and says let us move in and we will pay 250 towards the rent as we can't afford a place of our own.Upon our bi-weekly inspections we find that the sister and her 2 kids are there.Now you have 6 using the water etc.The reality with apartment buildings of this age and tenant base is that families consolidate to save costs.They might be renting an apartment elsewhere for 600.Job hours are cut and they move in with sis and pay 250 and save 350 a month.The extra usage of water is what I am concerned about.I do not condone extra people there but want to control extra water usage.

These are no doubt supported by employment,wages, low interest rates hence payment buyer affordability.