Some of the time the brokers supervising are more balanced and mature in their thinking.

B) Make good friends with a small banker and do a couple of deals with him/her to get a rapport.C) Buy RE with a personal guarantee (but deed it at closing to the LLC) so you can get a balance sheet on your LLC that demands respect from the small banker in point B aboveThis will allow you to do business more easily on behalf of your business rather than you as an individual investor.

I know values have still not bottomed, properties are worth half what they were, foreclosures and mort balances higher than values, even short sales STILL are higher than the values.

The balance is allocated to improvements.

forgot to mention that is easier to replace in the event it needs to be down the road. in my area, I find that the slight increase in material costs is offset by cheaper labor costs to install so it pretty much balances itself out..

The risk/work/reward should balance out and all parties should be very happy. 

The condo is currently appraise at $150,000.00 and the balance of the mortgage is $51,000.00.Here is where I need your advise, I need to cash out the equity on the condo so I can invest in real estate and keep the condo as the first property on my rental portfolio.  

That being said, you may want to check with Wells Fargo as they have a good small balance program with up to a 25 year amortization.

Good to know tenant is responsible for bill, suggest year-round balanced billing to take out some of that winter sting.

Estimated debt - for this one there are three steps: a) you need to find every loan they've take between the date they purchased the property and today, b) you need to determine which of those loans are still open and outstanding (for example you should find a reconveyance for each paid off loan, allowing you to eliminate it), and c) estimating the balance of the open loans, which can be tricky unless you have access to their credit report.Once you have these two then it is as simple as Est Equity = Est Value - Est Debt.