Be willing to teach and ask questions, like a good financial planner, instead of a car salesman buying cheap for his car lot.Many REIs come from engineering "number crunching" type of skills.The "soft skills" of negotiating with NLP is a major key to success in Seller financing negotiations.  

Understand the fine art of Contract Engineering and creative contract control clauses.Just because you have some money, don't be using all of it to put into real estate, use alternative methods of making offers;Offers subject a study period, one long enough to be able to market and flip the property; this is called cash flow without ownership.Try a Hybrid offer, this is where the seller partners with you (but get your contract right with full disclosures), with a Hybrid offer, the seller will contribute stuff, like repairing the property and put up some money for advertising and take back notes.Try a vertical break up with commercial properties, buy the building, but not the land, lease the dirt with an option to purchase it in the future.

Thirdly, make sure it is near a mayor metropolitan area within 10-45 minute drive.I'm constantly looking for these types of properties to build a McMansion (2800-3900 sqr. ft.) with my pre-engineered panelized home system.

@Ekaterina Stepanova Here is a website about the nano tech facility in Albany.http://www.ceg.org/economic_development/sites/the-college-of-nanoscale-science-and-engineering/

Those are generally handled by a certified engineer inspector.

Engineers stay after hours to do other jobs like guards, mow grass on company property,  etc etc.. 

I'm wanting to build a duplex and have much of the process started as far as my builder in place, engineering underway and multi-family lot in place.

I work in Civil Engineering down in San Diego and we run into this when clients are looking to do condo conversions or sometimes like what you're talking about.I think you need to clarify some terms here:Non-conforming is what you have now.

@Kim Handelman , I would just set some goals, especially a money number wether it be cash flow or profit per deal and engineer it backwards to the starting point and take Massive Action.Happy Investing!

I work a full time job as an Engineer making machines for manufacturing companies, but I have always wanted to invest in real estate and am now starting to get into the finer details of it so I can take it on as a part time and eventually have it become my fulltime job.