Also, there are small business forming that focus on building relationships with these companies and sourcing bookings for your property for a referral fee.

Also utilities and sitework should be less as you do not need to bring in two electrical services, water services and run two sewer services and connection fees.

I always recommend starting in your own market first, then go out of town, then out of state, but I understand California is expensive.If you need to create cash, wholesaling is the best alternativeIf you have some cash, then maybe do a few flix and flips to build your cash reserves.If you have cash saved, yes you can buy a rental in other markets, but you need to research and create your list of contacts in that marketYou can always buy a fixer upper, then refinance, and repeat, you can do that with favorable rates up to 10 times using loans for a secondary/investment home

As a buyer investor, I don't mind high interest rates.

I understand there is crime there, just like many low-cost areas, but I reached out to a rehabber about taking some photos of properties for us and he told me to look in other areas because of the high crime rate and that "it just keeps getting worse." 

Anything that you pay to your father to help rehab, I would take expense deduction as some kind of fee. 

As an example I have spoken to many and have volunteered to share lessons learned from notes, private lending, or any other type of real estate and first questions are “what will you pay for referral fee” or it costs X to speakWhen I tell them I am not selling anything - they don’t care.

Like any platform they have advantages and disadvantages.Advantages:1) transparency: they publish the full results of their loan book, making them only the third side in the industry to do this. 2) underwriting: they have a 1.8% uncured default rate, which is good and is much lower than some of the other competing platforms and hard money loan alternatives (although not all).

Add in the high interest rates on construction loans and mortgages, and it all makes for a difficult market for real estate investing.

Or possibly just a pref rate?