@Jason Boyer thanks for sharing your progress to date - love hearing stories of how people are investing and their backgrounds.

Love my time in Thailand, some very beautiful areas!

they charge $15 per credit report, and I was using background Info USA and they were the same cost, but I had to manually put all the tenant information in, and I just wanted to work smarter so I chose to discontinue using Background Info and go with Appfolio for the background.

You can easily end up with the building equivalent of a beautiful suit coat but no pants. 

Here's a little background on the numbers.

But I don't know how many times I have heard "we didn't know about the house but the beautiful landscape did it for us" or "This house was way above our price range but we got it anyways because of the landscape." so my question is, to professionally or not to design?

It's free, other than the food and drinks you order :) But there will be a lot of various backgrounds there for you to talk to and network with. http://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/521/topics/144...Good luck out there and welcome to the forum.

They do seem like good deals; but thats the beauty of auction right?

Some background: I have a steady, professional career in San Jose, CA and around 60K of cash.

Say you can only rent the main unit at $1,600 (up $200 from today) you’re still making a square $4,875 which makes the deal look attractive.Yes I’m playing with the numbers, but the property really is beautiful in that it is solid, low maintenance, great location, and has good appreciation potential with the neighborhood, including being next to a foreclosed house that based on the cracked foundation, we assume will be a teardown.