If someone told me the building department was manned by callous cyborgs pretending to be human I would not be surprised. 

Just like you are doing it now, talk to people, ask for advice, be a sponge and even though you may already know a lot, pretend you don’t, and let people tell you their perspective on topics of your interest.

For some reason the tenants have the worst time setting up ACH w/ their bank.There's a big thread here https://www.biggerpockets.com/... about various ways to collect rent; maybe something there will be interesting.To me, it seems like if you have a relatively small number of doors, you are either going to pay a couple of percent and get your money "right away", or pay nothing and have the rent-collection service sit on it for a few days.I hope this is getting less common over time, but I think some banks pretend to be bad at ACH on purpose. 

They then played the game of pretending not to be able to move in, and also started requesting additional items to be done PRIOR to officialy moving in.   

If I only learn ONE thing from a book it is well worth the price.Rather than list the books I like, you should pretend you're about to go to college and go buy a bunch yourself.

The reason is that actual balances are not public records data, so your only other alternatives to getting it from the owner are to call their lender and pretend to be them (illegal), or get access to their credit report (likely illegal too unless you get borrowers permission and at that point you might as well just ask for their statements).With that out of the way, the question then becomes how can you best guess at their balance.

I’m talking about the day you sell it, when the tax hit will actually be worse, but let’s pretend it’s 10 years from now. 

Sounds a bit too much like you're pretending to be a licensed agent.  

I find most people that will hold onto a property worth $x, wouldn't be willing to buy that property for $xSo I say "okay, pretend you drank to much, and in a drunken stooper, you sold the property to someone at it's fair market price. 

It appears to me he is an amateur pretending to know real estate.