This Tuesday WSJ article on self storage being a rare rising stock in this market selloff gave me hope!   

I mean with lowest down payment of 20-30% and commercial loans (@ 5-7%) the rents will rarely be double of the mortgage payment.

In very rare cases, it is worth the additional investment in order to acquire a property if it is in a highly appreciating market with year-over-year rental price increases.

Not that selling real estate as a broker is a walk in the park but done right and you get established it can be a lifelong career and well paying with a lot of flexibility on your time.. especially now a days where its rare that agents work out of the office..  

@Franco Battaglia if you are looking at Hagerstown, MD look at it in combination with Chambersburg, Greencastle, and Waynesboro, PA. each of those cities are within about 20 minutes of each other and have similar returns.

They had the best combination of services and price for what I wanted to do. 

Inspection clauses are par for the course and it's quite rare for them to be dropped even on new deals.

So, combining those strategies, let’s say I make 100kI can use the pass through to drop my taxable income to 80k...but can I tax shield 20k based on that 80k or still 25k into a self directed 401k based on the 100k?

@Marisa Alvarez I'm sure it is a combination of the two.

Similar events we see inventory and transaction volume drop but price rarely drops in our market. 2008 recession we hit -7%