That is, a typical homeowner will be ahead of a typical renter by a multiple of 45 on a lifetime financial achievement scale."

Stay away from large scale water intrusion issues (roof, siding, or otherwise), major foundation issues, issues with framing, stupid layouts that require rearranging walls, or places that have issues that can't be fixed (location, occupancy/zoning issues that impede your desired use, etc.)

When you figure out what you want you can map it back to those grading scales and then the shading (C vs.

Real estate has magical properties of leverage, creativity, and scale-ability that you just won't find in stock investing.Real estate is wildly complex and scary if you don't know what you're doing.

@Marques Johnson, Private Equity as an asset class and business had its start, albeit on a small scale, in the 1960s, and exploded in the 1990s.  

We're seeing some markets on a national scale being impacted already and with a recession looming people are stacking cash and waiting for the deals.

I have hopes to scale-up and buy more properties to have a rental portfolio and inevitably retire by 30.

We also utilized our payment plan procedures where we take the balance they owe and spread it out into affordable payments by using a sliding scale based upon the amount of the balance to determine the length of the payment plan.  

Obviously you can use that time educating yourself through e books and podcats, but many people spend 1-3 hours in traffic for work.Lots a big businesses could save huge amounts of overhead/rent by scaling down office sizes.

The larger homes perform better due to economy of scale.