As your assets increase you may want to get a personal umbrella policy (PUP) to cover any additional liability.

On the inside, think about every doctor's office you've ever been in: the major additional system comcern is that Plumbing is everywhere.

It also creates some additional costs (setup, maintenance, tax reporting) and will limit your financing availability (more expensive commercial loans).Depending of your threat level and the amount of asset that you are protecting it may be worth the cost.

The way you have proposed would be the most costly way to do this exercise. 

Management goes through rent rolls and finances of prospective sites, and I do physical inspections, gather certificates, check and estimate vacant and contracts, etc.It's usually an additional service in my experience, but works out well when we start take over new contracts.

Luckily I bought a property that was a fixer upper and I did all the renovations myself, and it also had a basement suite for an additional source of income. 4 years later, this market has finally bottomed and I'm just able to re-finance and pull out some capital.

If it were not, would that mean additional fees for having it zoned as such?

Since her home was flooded due to an interal plumbing issue and the insurance company is paying to remodel the existing old (1920s) and dilapidated structure (could tell by looking at some of the 2x4 studs revealed in the partial internal demolition), I decided to find out if my mother can use the money should would receive from the insurance company in the form of a check, put that towards the remodel, and in addition secure a construction-to-permanent loan in order to fund the complete transformation of her 1 bed 1 bath 1,200 sqft home into a 2-story duplex that she can rent out, airbnb, etc.

it will depend on if it has an addition put on it.....put a deck that has a roof on it that extends over the other roof and then it starts adding value. 

These are professionals with additional training and a stricter code of ethics.