Sound like to need to see professional advice in this area.To your question:  If she is going to stay in the home that needs repairs then you might look into a Reverse Mortgage that will let you pull out enough money to rehab the home and then she can live in it payment free for the rest of her life. 

He then tells me he has to find someone who has a license to pull the permit for him.

I am in the process of Refinance my house to pull some equity and reinvest on RE.

At the end (if they are not interested) ask them to keep your business card or contact info in their junk drawer, you never know in 5-20 years from now if they will pull out your info and call.6.

Pull out 8-9% of your gross rent to account for Cap Ex.

When I first started, this is how I found my first loan, pulled a list of over 100 lenders and went down the list until I found the lender I still use today after 25 calls.

Will you pull a credit report?

John says at that point the neighbor came out and immediately pulled a gun on him.

I have been getting my financial house in order before I can pull the trigger on anything. 

I usually tell my clients to do a pretty mild value add first deal you can then refinance by pulling higher comps and the mild value add to get a HELOC (this is just a line of credit while keeping original mortgage) there is a bank in chicago that does 95 LTV HELOC you then pull from that HELOC for the next deals rehab funds to do a more significant rehab.