I always advise people, especially new investors, to let google street view become your best friend when you're researching areas for investing and take a look at the street you're investigating plus several surrounding blocks.

We have avoided investigating opportunities EOTR to date, but will start analyzing more based on all of the positive feedback.

I would suggest to work off a preliminary design and show to few builders

After much investigation in available software I ended up using EasyRent.com.  

According to State of Florida investigators most of these people that deal with these unlicensed Brokers are the elderly and people with poor grasp of the English language in short they are taken advantage of 

You don’t care about most of the paperwork except the Note, Deed of Trust, the sales contract, preliminary title report, hazard insurance, and lender instructions to escrow.

After reading yours and Naseer's feedback and doing some more investigation about LLC's, it seems that wouldn't be the best option for us at the moment, since we would just be buying our first property and don't have many assets to need an LLC.

@Yonah WeissI have always considered education as “barbells for the mind”.It’s not so much the subject matter as working your brain making it stronger, learning to focus, to investigate problems and issues with logical thought - testing one’s knowledge and beliefs through rigorous examination.So education is valuable no matter what you do.In my case, I have a Masters of Science degree from University of Michigan but I went into real estate directly after finishing my “formal” education.That was a long time ago and now after four decades of real estate brokerage and investing, I still enjoy it as much as ever.

Note: We didn’t confirm or investigate further with the permit office.We ultimately purchased in Elk Grove near a great high school for 100-200k less and almost twice the square footage of the higher price point in Davis.

One water heater kills a years cash flow.I'm looking for more duplex's now as I find the cash flow to be better than single family (in most cases and in the one's I've investigated).