If you are leasing your own properties there are no tax advantages to using an LLC or corporation though there may be legal and asset protection reasons to use them.If you are flipping, managing properties for others, wholesaling or developing you may have tax advantages to using one or more various business entities.

If you develop your own spreadsheets in excel, a great one is PDF Experts as well.

In this line of work reputation is everything and I would dread finding a deal, getting it under contract and not being able to successfully close on it.

Upside is a developer may want to buy you out, low cap rate when selling, or value still high if things go wrong.

The main reasons are the population of these two cities are growing fast, there will be high speed rail station built up in Palmdale which will help local development, and finally these two cities are within 60 miles radius of LA.

It could end up costing thousands in legal fees.I have had success getting tenants to leave by finding them another unit in the same development & paying for their moving costs (a few hundred dollars).

You first have to become very familiar with the market and you initially must spend time in the market. second you must develop a reliable team if not a property manager at least a handyman and contacts for more complicated repairs.

The Realtor should meet the agent doing the BPO to provide comp.s and any repair estimates that You can develop to help justify the price.

That last part is an important clue to vetting the don't care properties from the ones that the owner just hasn't gotten around to working on (REO, rehabber, developer, etc.).Do you mail, door knock, hire kids on bicycles, etc.?

Alison Miller - That is great advice, and in fact I've developed my own software to keep track of all my leads and mailings.