I would ideally want to self manage but not real familiar with dealing with active duty 

The seller wants to buy the home back down the road, so the tenant situation is fairly ideal as long as his income doesn't tank again (divorce and job loss are the initial hardship reasons).I'd also like to incorporate into my financing agreement something that states that non-payment of rent by the seller would result in non-payment of the mortgage, mitigating my risk in the mortgage. 

This person would ideally be knowledgeable about both buy and hold and fix N flip single family and multi family properties.Please let me know if you are interested.ThanksRick

If it is cheaper to buy then anyone with good jobs/income/credit (basically your ideal tenant) will buy instead of rent, so your tenant pool is everyone else.  

Ideally if the city will bill back if I buy the meters that would be a dream come true for me and one less thing that I need to worry about!  

We are ideal borrowers, very good credit +740, 20% down, cash reserves for monthly payments etc.

Ideally I'd like to see that number closer to zero for a really good deal, but that might be wishful thinking about the level of margin to expect in this business...  

My new strategy is to invest strictly for cash flow and California is not an ideal market for this.

Hi,Since reading through this forum for the last few days, I have decided that I would like to invest in properties in good, safe working class areas, in the 50k-70k range.Being from the UK I think that starting with Turnkey properties would be best as it provides a more hands off solution, rather than buying somewhere that needs rehab as this would be very difficult to manage from the UK.When it comes to finance it seems that options are limited, ideally I would want to put as little down as possible so I guess I may need to be creative!

This is about as ideal as it comes to a good situation to get a deal.