Port Huron has a Rental Certification department that issues certification (and fines for blight and other building violations) and without it you can't evict in the courts and can get severely fined if your tenant reports you or they find out.

So without really seeing a flyer of what you are trying to do and the numbers involved I would not know which program or lender might be best for your situation.Some lender stay in major metro's, others go further out.

In some areas there are incentives for creating affordable housing and even special voucher programs for housing vets.

@Nicholas Almgren, @Conor Hesch has a program with U.S.

He is THE Storage Guy and has a great program.  

I performed the programming behind this one: estimatingrepairs.net

@Joel OwensI feel like I should pay you for the advice you have given me.I understand that research and knowing your market is key, and I hope my background in advanced statistical analyses will be able to give me an edge is some way since I have access to programs a lot of other real estate agents do not have.I'm actually working on a quick-fix analyses sheet and would love to share it with you afterwards and see what you think of it.Oren K.I definitely want to work with investors.I understand that each sale will be harder, the commissions will be smaller and the research will be more extensive.

Greg,Interesting question, CAPEX ,Maintenance and Vacancy figures are in the analysis to cover the seasonal cost,any major projects that will come up and costs that you will occur while an apartment is vacant, but as to figure in at a certain year and how much you need to set aside and what your exact holding costs will be for an apartment while under rehab, i have not seen a calculator out there that has that, i do not know if there is a software program out there that may do that, hopefully someone does for you.

Well, I'm not going to give you hype and encourage you to lure you into any program or strategy of acquiring rentals or doing lending.

Maybe one with a mentorship program.