She retains ownership, he makes payments and gets possession.

One of the commercial spaces is used by the current owner and I believe they were going to sign a long lease to retain the space.As for the area, I think it is moving up.

My market is roughly 2+ hours away from my house, which is close enough to handle urgent matters and retain a large amount of control.

susan, thanks for the replyive never heard of this possibility before- so bare with me...if i could find this "MONEY MAN" and got a loan on the from him for the repairs and down payment (hopefully a 10% down investor loan)...we'd be talking around $40K...this $40K loan could be interest only at say 10%...also the deal would include 50% appreciation to the "money man"...so basically this money man gets 10% return on his $$ plus 50% of any future appreciationthis "money man" would have no responsibility whatsoever...i would do all proprery management, dealing w/ contractors, screening tenants, dealing w/ tenants etc...i would also retain any and all of the cash flowhow does this sound?...

Are you generally forced to pay the back taxes to retain control of the property?

I wish I could elaborate but my neighbor has been reading my posts and I don't want to give away specific details.I suppose that in anticipation of legal action, our neighbor has already retained a defense attorney.

Also, there's a statutory period for which to file and retain low property tax basis.

In Florida you would never send a check unless there was no claim against it, and we do not allow this.We have a 95$ to be retained from security deposit clause for cleaning which must be accepted by the tenant or they don't get the lease.

So, I would have to either promise a fee or to retain their services. 

Retaining money (i.e. 50% rule) wouldn't have helped much.