The most common is leaning on your agent for their expert advice.

You also have to think about outfitting common spaces, how your going to do that, and how your going to do it in a way that keeps the "village" happy and nice with everyone.

I'm unsure if you would be able to combine both loans given that the HELOC is tied to a different property than the one you got traditional financing on.A work around is if you are able to purchase the new property with the HELOC at a significant enough discount, bring the property value up via renovations or additions, then refinance the property, pulling out enough money to repay the HELOC. 

This is a common problem for other places besides California.Most of my clients are out-of-state investors-California being one of the most common places for investors I work with.I would say, in general, it is very similar to in-state investing in that your investment is as good as the team you use.

A less then full investigation may result in one thinking that the house and or the house and tennis court lots were what was being sold.As I later found out, a newbie tax lien investor thought they were getting a great bargain by outbidding other misinformed investors and paying the back taxes, legal fees, and an additional $34,000 (overage) which the county forwarded to me.  

In addition to rent, you can setup late fees and other fees to be collected. 

We wanted additional units to pay mortgage and have cash flow.

This was not what I was interested in doing and when I voiced that I was interested in 5-20 unit deals and had the funding for that in place I just got additional push back for buying the larger buildings.

Second, I'd connect with some local hosts in your area also in addition to Airdna.

.- Value add - How much does it cost to build additional storage units?