With strategic purchases you can have immediate cashflow in excess of your expenses once your tenant moves in. 

Staging, photography and design can either be their own jobs or incorporated into another job.  

At every stage there have been new hurdles, from the 203k loan falling through to the VA never clearing leins that were from the city for not mowing the yard.  

My MO is to serve investors at every stage in their commercial or residential career.  

He discovered I held a number of highly leveraged properties with mtg rates @ 18% (after he saw the excessive amount of paid overtime some of us were collecting).He had lost a lot of money on REI so was understandably biased, but coincidentally he also ran one of the worst departments we had the misfortune to revamp & attempt to make fiscally viable. 

They offered to do so since I am putting in the work to stage the event.

I get the reasoning behind this but the key question is at what stage of your business cycle.

Hello BP,I feel that I am at the information overload stage from all the amazing stuff I've discovered on this site.

My house should be fixed, staged and ready to sell by April so I guess that's not really that far off.

. $2,000 could be considered excessive if you are purchasing a $60K property but might be standard if the property is $300K.