Where as, if a broke investor started off with a 50K property and put only 5k worth of work into it and 60 days later its worth 125K. that is a excellent move. otherwise it will take a monthly cashflow focused investor forever to to stack up that amount of money vs my example 0f 60 days. 

It’s an excellent place to start, and can answer many of your questions.

I'm sure some people have good working relationships with contracts and know guys that'll do it for a fraction of that and if you do the legwork / grunt work yourself you'll save money yadda, yadda, yadda.

But it's the paperwork (the Lease Agreement, the Option Agreement, etc.) that will have the biggest impact on your success or lack thereof.Do not do lease-option unless you have received adequate training and have access to excellent documents.Since you are here in Georgia, I would strongly recommend you look at the training and documents offered by Dyches Boddiford.

Your relationships and reputation with other agents is incredibly important to your business.

If their maximum bid instruction is acceptable to us, we tell the lawyer, as a courtesy, if we plan to bid higher than their bid instructions, and we immediately bid a dollar higher than their minimal bid limit when the sale comes up and the lawyer representing the foreclosure entity bids the minimum amount to start the sale.As another courtesy, I also talk to other regular investors at the sale whom I have done business with or whom I have another business relationship.

I also try to enhance this relationship by buying my rentals through my PM as they’re also agents.

HI Josh, excellent feedback and questions.  

It might take a while, but you can build a spreadsheet of materials on your own in Excel and as others have stated, you can find home design software online.

Excellent food for thought that we will discuss between ourselves and with our agent over the next couple of days so we are prepared.