My wife is extremely risk averse so this slowly built her confidence in us leveraging my professional skill sets outside of the W2 for greater financial gain. 

Every month I carry cash to my bank branch to pay down the balance of my mortgage, I've been doing it in the last 6 months, because I happened to have cash.I know if I do the same thing to my checking account, it could be flagged to the IRS as "structuring" or "smurfing", but does that apply to mortgage too?

I also like the idea of a longer mortgage term because it shields you from interest rate and inflation risk for a longer time, and of course you can always pay down your principal faster if you'd like, so I'd look for a 30-yr fixed.  

With every additional unit, you slightly reduce your tenant risk and find that valuations are better on larger assets.

Otherwise they are running the risk of getting fined by the city and/or people taking it lightly and starting to keep junk or non-working items on their premises and eventually turning the park into a car junk yard.With that said, i don't think any reasonable manager  would refuse a request to postpone this by a couple of weeks (if that's what we are talking about).

The cool thing about Wharton was that the person who built that 1000 homes on a golf course was right in front of you as a guest speaker for that class and listening to how you analyzed and mitigated the risks.

There is an argument to be made that a land contract or a subject 2 structured strong enough could cross the "risk of loss passing" bar and that the bundle of rights you have in controlling the property is enough to make it equivalent to having a deeded interest in the property.We've done 1031 exchanges for land contracts occasionally. 

Lovely couple hitting it out of the park.  75 Rental Units in Their Early 30s with Jason and Carrie Harris | BP Podcast 288:  https://youtu.be/W9TZLVTfk6E

Your tenants can also transfer money directly into an operating account that your bank can "sweep" nightly if you want to eliminate risk. 

You want to help companies make financial decisions based on risk, well they are going to want you to have a lot of skin in the game to do that.