For example, a 2/1 house Berkeley CA rents for $3500 a month the market value of the house is about $975k. 

Hi Zak,I have lot's of CA clients.Different investments require different levels of purchase price for quality.One of my clients sold a tech company that is in CA a few years back.

(I live in SF, CA).I found a property I like, but the inspection report just came back with a lot of items.

Hello, I am a low income rural homesteader who lost my home in a Ca. wildfire.

I live in California, and have around $500K that I was going to use for a downpayment on an owner-occupied property (2-4 units) allowing the rental income from that property to pay for my mortgage/home expenses.

A friend is wondering about syndicating and bringing in equity in California.

I need some sort of protection as I hire them often daily I have another neighbor who is in California and does much less construction than me. 

The biggerpockets.com people paid some lawyers to write up reasonable leases: https://www.biggerpockets.com/landlord-forms I've only looked at the California ones, but that one had not only leases, but common addenda, applications for the tenants, etc, and both PDF and Word docs that allow you to edit if you wish.

In California we had an unpaid garbage bill turn into a court summons which turned into a title insurance claim that was resolved without issue.

Next I would try to find a smaller area within the zip code and then start searching for individual properties.If I can’t find anything in California, I would start looking elsewhere using the same steps.In your opinion, is that a good approach?