Can be tough to line up a 1031 on a short sale since short sales are speculative and not guaranteed to be approved.

The legal/procedural overhead of a private placement is too high for a small deal like that.

This could lead to a future event that optionee comes up and buy my property at a stipulated price.Currently, I have heard a few things:- Title company: they say there have been a few transactions after this Option, there should be no issue, but this is not covered by insurance- an unpaid legal advice from a local lawyer: this is a defected title, should cancel the purchase- Realtor: we will try to remove this, but this is not an important issue- Realtor friends: No.

Find an agent who is an investor. go to meetups in your area to get exposed more and network. picking up random properties on Zillow with out knowing all the expenses and repairs isn't the best way to utilize the calculator. you will need accurate numbers to see if you will cash flow. start your search for a property now as sometimes it can take time to find the right one depending the area. get pre approved and go house hunting with a link minded realtor. then you can plug in the numbers into a calculator and see if any will work. best of luck.

So nothing we can legally change there.  

Sellers will give an advantage to pre-approved buyers over other buyers who are just kicking tires.

Has anyway had issues with legal zoom?

Here is my process I have thought out for now, please feel free to critique/provide improvements based on experience:Learn through BiggerPockets, David Greene, Gary Keller -- I personally want to avoid getting too deep into this phase, get the basics and run with itCreate a system on analyzing a property - I have my own parameters that work for me and have put them on an excel sheet - I have what I call 'quantitative' and 'qualitative' tabs that give me a 300 degree viewGet pre-approved as I am learningNext comes the Research phase (learning and researching are going together) - this is taking time.  

I’m trying to get an idea of a pro forma P&L, and I honestly have no idea what the costs are, outside of the costs of the note itself and legal expenses.

Through friend that know that I am in the rental business, negotiation focused on making sure that there are no surprises, like large outstanding bills, lawsuit, legal problem, due to foreclosed condition.