Personally, I have a boutique investment company.

House hacking will also give you some personal "property management" experience.

We have a person on board with a degree in design, so we usually tweak the floor plans for sight lines and function.

I'm further assuming that both your personal home, and the property, are both in Lancaster County. 

Hey Anthony, I am a Real Estate Agent and investor based in Columbus and personally grew up in Cleveland .

I have not done too many deals in your market, and I anticipate things are nuanced depending on the property type and condition and based on the personality of the owner....BUT it is common and customary in my world, which is usually retail/med office, for tenants to have at least some time of free rent during the buildout.We usually structure things as follows, and you can change the number of days around but this is traditionally what we at least shoot for when we have a tenant we are repping.- Lease commencement date is to be the 6/1/24 or when the landlord's work is complete. and we traditionally have penalties in place if the LL's work takes too long and pushes us past our initial timeline.- then we typically have "rent commencement" or when you start paying rent, to be the earlier of either 180 days following lease commencement or when you are open for business.  

Make sure to ask the bank if they will report the business card to your personal credit report. 

It's hard for anyone to give advice on such a personal decision, but I'm almost always in the position of never selling.

I was wondering what everyone's experience with establishing a legal entity for REI has been like, and when do you recommend a person to do so?

As I said, I think it can make sense to buy and hold real estate personally AND inside retirement accounts.