I feel like half my time in PhD school was devoted to stalking the real estate in Chicago and reading blogs on real estate investing :). 

I had a guy quote me approx $2700 for the work to remove the mortar and tuckpoint the stairs and chimney, and another contractor quote me almost half of that at $1400 for a complete rebuild (all new) of the steps and tuckpoint of the chimney. 

I typically charge half once we are half way done with project and final payment once client is completely satisfied with work. 

They take 1 to 1.5 hours to sign and about half hour to prepare.

If you want to get into wholesaling, your money is gonna be made from advertising and half of that is from following up with people who deny you.

Be careful somwraworth as a municipality has had a lot of problems with funding and they just lost half of there students to Eliot Maine there prop taxes are crazy high and climbing

I'm content with $100/door in my area.Find out from your property manager how much the unit can be rerented for with none of the improvements, all of the improvements, and half of the improvements and run the numbers with the different rents.I would lean toward doing the upgrade items and basic cosmetics, but not do the middle of the road items that typically need to be done and redone.  

Everyone knows the easiest way to get started is wholesaling from what they say and from what I've heard.

So a 50k loan at 2 points makes them 1k in fee's  that's a ton of risk for such a small loan and if it turtles you can lose half your money in that market no sweat.. that is the other major hurdle. 

Here are the details: LP: $199k (dropped about $50k in the past month and a half - could this mean they're too anxious?