You seem to be using 60% LTV to improve your projected Cash Flow.  

@Ed Emmons these days a lot lot of analyzers can be found online and you should be able to get very good results rather than using 50% rule which is very vague and does not work in all markets and all assets.

@Jim Growfer think it's okay to use the 50% rule to quickly gauge NOI and determine if a project is worth deeper analysis. 7% interest is high and yes, that would be a bad deal if you only netted $10k on a $2 million purchase.

Are these improvments supposed to be "depreciated" over a number of years?

Here is my process I have thought out for now, please feel free to critique/provide improvements based on experience:Learn through BiggerPockets, David Greene, Gary Keller -- I personally want to avoid getting too deep into this phase, get the basics and run with itCreate a system on analyzing a property - I have my own parameters that work for me and have put them on an excel sheet - I have what I call 'quantitative' and 'qualitative' tabs that give me a 300 degree viewGet pre-approved as I am learningNext comes the Research phase (learning and researching are going together) - this is taking time.  

When we make a real estate purchase, we often pay for the down payment from our own funds (equity in) and use business funds to pay for the improvements and operation costs.

USED AS A GUIDE NOT A RULE50% of gross income = NOI right? 

It's usually around 2 years with potential to extend in 1 year increments.The issue is that 5 years might not be long enough to breakeven on the improvements you plan on making.

When does the 180-day rule begin? 

Back to the property management company scenario - they manage based on your paperwork and your rules.