I had a older Jewish mentor named Sam Miller from Forest City Enterprises.

A mortgage lien and note are surely only one way to handle private money, especially when taking a loan from family / friends, or when a private money lender wants you to keep the loan out for subsequent flips. 

@Kristen Bouvier Scoville, if you want tax deferral from a 1031 then you want to have the LLC sell the property and subsequently the LLC will need to purchase the replacement property as well. 

IE tenant or subsequent buyer defaults causes huge damage and your now faced with negative cash flow for a year and 20k to fix the place. if you can handle that its okwhat happens though is you have unsophisticated sellers and in a lot of instances the home is lost to the bank and the sellers credit is trashed.. plus many times they want to buy something else and with this mortgage still in their name they cant.its just a very risky dangerous thing for a seller. 

Lending practices were drastically tightened after '08 which has subsequently lead to better underwriting and better debt securities.

We were going to have a formal inspection done before making an offer just to be crystal-clear on what we would be dealing with, but the realtor suggested we save some time and money by having a contractor take a look to help us determine the repairs required, and subsequently how much we should offer.Is this pretty standard practice as far as "due diligence" goes? 

If the tenant doesn't respond appropriately to the initial legal notices to comply with the terms of the rental agreement, then we turn it over to our attorney to proceed and their process server will deliver subsequent legal notices.For simple communications, some landlords have success with email and/or texting.

If there is considerable equity in the property, this situation can be quite profitable, by acquiring the seller's interest and subsequently foreclosing on the non-selling co-owner for his/her unpaid portion of the expenses.It works like this, do a title search to confirm who has how much interest in the house, and get a good inspection to see what maintenance is currently required. 

The strategy is to keep the property preforming + offsetting our expenses as long as possible by renovating units, bringing them to market, and turning over the subsequent units.

If there's a property that has already had a foreclosure suit filed against the property owner by a holder of a tax lien certificate against that property and I own a subsequent tax lien on the same property, will the Plaintiff be required to pay off my TLC if/when they win the case?