Is their a rule of thumb for this sort of thing, percentage wise?

Also some new landlord rules up in Seattle are making it an unattractive market.  

I am looking to begin my adventure in REI to improve my retirement account in order to have the opportunity to retire in the next 5-10 years. 

It is the fine details that are often different (eg, there is no such thing as a forclosure in Ontario, there is no "courthouse steps" auction, there is no "absentee owner list" and the rules regarding landlord/tenant are wildly anti-landlord here).

Hello EveryoneI'm Real ABR, GRI Estate Agent in San Antonio Texas, I mentor new real estate agents and investors to train them the whole prosses and TREC rules.

This may be a long post, but I thought it would be good to walk through everything step-by-step, and explain my thinking along the way.If you want to stick with me through it all, here we go:I was not going to be getting a conventional mortgage for my first property for a number of reasons.First, I am still annoyed at the hoops I had to jump through to get a mortgage for my primary residence.Second, my liquid cash was on the lower end.Third, the properties that I would need to start out with would not be financeable anyway.Fourth, my DTI is on the high side, due to the decision that we made to take out a HELOC to complete interior improvements on my primary house.So, I decided that my path was going to be to form a single member LLC, and take a loan from my 401(k) at work to finance the down payment.Since I do not view the 401(k) loan as a long-term solution, I am treating like hard money, and pay it off ASAP.So, my first deal would be a flip, or a rental that was such a good deal, that I could re-fi out and pull all my cash out.I decided to reach out to the commercial lending department of the local credit union, which I am a member.The person I talked to (who became my lender) is fantastic.I told him what types of properties I was looking for, and that I’d look to turn them into rentals, or to flip them.I will never forget his response, which reminded me why I love this credit union.He said:“Typically, the deals you are talking about are much smaller than the deals we like to do.However, we also realize that you can not get to that level unless someone helps you get there.So, if the numbers make sense, we will see if any of our products fit.”Awesome!

The primary thing I would be looking at is the purchase price to rent ratio (1%, 2% rule).

I know I will have to pay incomes taxes as apart of this conversion, but I've been doing some reading and can't seem to understand if I will also be hit with additional taxes as a result of something called "pro-rata rule".

We reach out at multiple times throughout the redemption period, all the way to the end.Part of me is beginning to think that foreclosure is such a touchy subject to many people, that many would rather just ignore taking any action, and just let the property go, even though our "cash for keys" and offers to list their properties give them a chance to make something good out of a bad situation.Conversely,  somewhat seasoned marketer in me wants to stay the course, and keep altering our message until we improve our response rates; after-all, people have been successfully marketing to people in foreclosure and pre-foreclosure for years, which makes me think there is hope to ramp-up response rates.Sorry for all the text, I'm thinking out loud a bit here.Has anyone had any success marketing to mortgagors during the redemption period?  

My objective is to move the building in the other direction with improvements and rent increases to get higher quality tenants.