Neither outcome is good for you.I give some approximations of each expense category in The Hands-Off Investor, but the best way to nail down operating costs is to look at the property's historical performance.For example, Contract Services and Utilities. 

If you can live for free and only pay utilities AND buy an investment property, that would be ideal in terms of savings and cash flow.If you can't stay and your parents want to make some money on that property, then yes, house hacking would be your best option especially since you don't want the best place in the multi.

It's a beautiful custom home, one of the biggest and easily one of the nicest homes in a so-so neighborhood of Oakland, CA (i.e.

At Baselane, we're going to build the custom chart of accounts and Balance sheet.Just for my own understanding, I'd like some clarification on your statements.1.

At the time I looked, 20 or so years ago, the problem with smaller down towns is the proliferation of nearby strip malls, where the stores are surrounded by a large parking lots, and for laundromats, attract more customers as they can park easily, walk to adjacent stores for shopping, snacks, and browse newspaper and magazine racks, which explains why they do better, there's more customers.

Separately metered with tenants paying all utilities.

If you're looking to make short term use of the equity and have a private lender/investor who's willing to think outside of the box, you might be able to create a custom repo agreement. 

While I don’t suggest that the smaller type investor purchase and utilize “exotic” vehicles like foreign asset protection trusts, family limited partnerships with outside controls, or Byzantine or convoluted maze of ownership entities, the more simple strategies of using Series LLCs, self directed retirement plans, and paying off their home mortgage to the extent of the Federal BK homestead exemptions can insure that a plaintiff attorney never even considers going after them.  

There were challenging grading issues and limited access from the street to bring in utilities.

Glad you have good customer service as well -- something that wasn't done well in 2014-2015.