Thanks for arranging this.

He have me his tenant's cell # so I could call her and make arrangements to tour the inside.

I'm still in the beginning stages, but I am fired up and excited!

Don't do that.This means that if you have your two other friends give you the money for the deal and the arrangement is that you will use the money to buy the property, then sell the property and give them their money back plus a percentage of the profits, and they are not active participants in the business with voting rights, you have sold them a security. 

Now I haven't done any REI as I am still in the stage of soaking up as much knowledge as I can.

California is not an ideal market so I will be looking at different markets over the next few months and aim to start my next stage of investing in March / April 2015.I am new to out of state investing (and went to school at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo where the motto is "learn by doing") so I want to spend a minimum of a few months in my desired market, personally building my team and portfolio. 

I'm just in the beginning stages of education myself so I don't have much knowledge to shed on the topic.I do have QUESTIONS on the topic though.

"Bite the first bullet" and arrange for a movers and consider it a tax deduction on that property.By the way, Congratulations on jumping in on RE market and buying the house !.

Some factors to consider are that there will be some new condos which are in the planning stages to be built next to mine so I'm concerned there will be more competition, still it's California and I don't see this property going too far down in value because of that, but not surehere are the numbersmy rental-condo - one exactly like mine just sold for 269K currently receive $1200 mo. from renter but have HOA of 320 mo.this condo is paid offOrshould I stick it out and see if the value of the condo goes up in a few years and then sell? 

Apparently, they don't have to disclose things like that if they are just in the evaluation stage.