Even if the house burned to ground I still would be sitting on a nice plot of land.  

These properties are easy to find, but if you don't have this business model burned into your brain and you don't seek properties that will give you a 50% to 100% return on your investment capital every year then there is no way you can achieve this goal.You will not earn 50% to 100% on your money investing in Bakersfield unless you found some sort of investment property for 50 cents on the dollar and I will bet that you did not come even close.

This prevents the lease from being bloated with things like changing burned out light bulb is on the tenant, fixing a hinge on a door is whose responsibility etc Fortunately we don’t have to deal with any of this as al of our rentals are in the country with land and all tenants have animals.  

However, I discovered a rehab of a downtown building with a residence upstairs that they were able to use a special spray foam that had a 4 hour burn through.

When you said you had almost no cash or equity and were asking about putting a CA tenant in a place that you know has roaches, I thought you were a noob about to get burned. 

I've been a licensed contractor for 48+ years, do several million dollars in business every year and still get burned and still beat myself up for making mistakes  Don't worry.

That burns my buns with illegals are asking for $25 per hour, tax free, and that is more than most legal Americans are earning when working at restaurants, or for Costco, Sams Club,  UPS, Amazon, etc.The problem I am having is my own employees do jobs for a percent, or commission and they were satisfied when them earned $1,000 to $1,200 per week.

I'd much rather have a buyer's agent do their job and get their portion of the commission.But that aside, it burns me to see that without any disclosure up front you were put in a situation in which a buyer's agent was supposedly assigned to you.

If your friend is brand new to the game, they probably did get lucky, because usually it's so easy to get burned at that price range - there's so much that can go wrong.

It’s because I’m tired of burning the candlestick at both ends and not having any time with family.