I should have also added that the reason I am pulled towards real estate as a wealth generating mechanism (I.e. the appreciation aspect) is that I bought my first house with ~$20K of my own money in Baltimore (supplemented with 6K of grants), bought at the right time and did a little fixing it up, used the proceeds from sale of Baltimore home to get into the lower end of the market in quickly appreciating Seattle.

This far the mechanics of what he is doing are clear to me.

When the rental was published, they added a mechanical lock with the house keys inside.

It might be a value-add for prospective tenants to know there is a mechanism in place to leave early.

But larger repair items such as appliances and mechanical, plumbing, electrical, roof windows doors etc should still fall under the landlord's responsibility.

All of the mechanicals, including permit dates and any identifiers.

Need to put the windows and doors in, and then start the mechanical rough inside.  

Once those are complete, rough plumbing, electrical and mechanicals can be started (rough plumbing should go first, then mechanicals as these are the larger sized items and rough electrical is easier to work around them than vice versa.

I usually spend my time, if the seller is present, keeping him/her out of the way if needed, pumping tenants for info, taking measurements for room sizes and drawing floor plans with doors and windows and noting appliances and taking pictures.We look for value add properties that are in decent structural and mechanical condition (except for one deal that we got really cheap).

I would make sure they are both up-to-date on repairs and mechanicals before investing in a third asset that could have repairs come due all at the same time as your others.