Our friends just suggested we looked into series-LLC- I'm going to research that and see if that's a better approach going forward.You can do a reverse entity search and find the owner of any LLC in Iowa- so you can "kind of" stay anonymous, but not all the way. 

I'm by no means a 20 year veteran in RE, but I do have some experience and have had people reach out to me using various approaches, falling into 1 of 2 categories.

Are you just driving and approaching home owners?

Residential appraisal are based on CMA, often price per units.Commercial appraisal based on the income approach. -- If they are Residential then you need to know what units of the same type are selling for in that market.

Replacing all the windows with the ugly arch design intact will cost $1400 per window + labor(second and third story installs, maybe 200 per window).

There are IRA and other designated IRA that can bring down your AGI.  2)If you make way over 150k, than I would suggest investing in a diversified property group with different outcomes (some rentals might not have a good future appreciation or in a bad area, but have a good cash flow that will absorb your other rental loss ). 3) Invest in other business as a passive investor where you can generate passive income.

Great design.

Although this is not my career path, I have always loved the idea of designing homes or fixing them up and have been wanting to add real estate to my investment portfolio!

Not sure how I need to approach it.

Their future land use plan also calls for changing the zoning from R2 to R1 so the R2 designation is pretty much worthless since There is not currently multiple buildings on the property.