I suggest you visit the city and get to know the areas and people, before you spend a nickel. 

Just go through some of the ideas shared , spend a day crunching numbers , educating yourself and seeing if you can make it all work!

My business partner has a hypothesis that spending extra money to build an abundance of storage space into a rental unit will keep tenants "sticky".

How does spending time & money removing an income stream from my life only to replace it with another one that may or may not be worse increase my bottom line?

Be ready to spend it.Step 3.

I live in a large Amish Community in Southern Indiana with several different things to offer but just not sure if I should only promote a place for people to stay or widen the choices to include tours and actual time they (Tourists) could spend at Amish Farmsteads which would include learning all aspects of the Amish Lifestyle.

My main investor always says he will glading spend 2k to save 10k.  

To successfully perform a flip the house flipping company needs to Spend time & money marketing to distressed sellers to source a deal with a large profit potentialEstimate the ARV of the dealEstimate the repair costs of the dealDetermine if there is enough profit in the deal to make sense for a flipNegotiate a sales price with the owner of the propertyHire the General ContractorManage the renovationEnsure the renovation is completed on time & on budgetMarket & sell the property for the estimated ARV to ensure they hit the estimated profit marginAfter successfully doing all of that why would they then hand over the majority of the profits to you?

I did not go through every single cell, but I did spend some time looking at it.

Part of getting into REI is so that we can spend more of our time together rather than spending more than half our day at other jobs and commuting, getting to work together is a big part of why we want to take this on (and the potential that RE Investing has for financial freedom).My Concerns: I originally thought I would develop myself as a contractor and do most of the work myself at first, but when I consider the time constraints (holding a house way longer to do the work myself, and the quality of work suffering) I realize this isn't an optimal plan.