I call this the hybrid approach, maybe investing locally in deals for your active spirit if time, skills and interest are there while balancing more difficult DIY projects out side of you area w/passive focus in niche areas like large scale value add apartment investing, mobile home parks and self storage for instance.  

I live about 1 hour from each property, so I will be using a more local management company, but with checks and balances to go through me (I want to see a prospective tenant's information; I also want to see repair estimates before any work is done).Both buildings have had some remodeling done to them.  

He is willing to take the risk of losing a little market upside with locking into a tangible asset he owns.I tended to be fairly consistent in annually looking at my portfolio and seeing what had performed, what had not, and re-balancing as needed (based on traditional pie chart models of diversification).  

If they run their own in-house property management company the costs might balance out to 7% of gross rents when you have to use a 3rd party vendor at 10% of gross rents.  

This could have been achieved with creative finance: but not with a conventional loan and more than likely not without a partner.Recommend these secured credit cards:-Citi-Discover (offers rewards)-Capital OneUse automatic payments on the full balance and only utilize 30 percent of your card limit; 10 percent is optimal.

The good ole checks and balances system...

You have to keep a careful balance so that you can meet the obligations to your current deals and keep deal flow moving without over committing to the point that your performance suffers.As such, marketing spend should ramp up to the point of your operational capacity. 

They'll be paid off before you ever show the balances and you'll have all of one HELOC and part of the other to go house hunting with.

With $0 balances on collection accounts, lexington law can actually challenge those tradelines with the bureaus, and almost 99% of the time, they can get them removed from their credit report (I know this, because I've personally used them myself).

In the end the balance will be about the same as I currently end up with.