I'm 100% acknowledging that I have no understanding or experience in your market, but the fact that a housing market exists, where its appropriate to give a tenant $61k to give you control of your own property blows my mind.

The amount of money some people spend on courses and books is mind blowing.

Once the blow up in construction is closer to done in Oakland and San Francisco we are going to see the domino effect through Richmond and Vallejo.

My tenant contacted me late last night saying the heat wasn't blowing upstairs but it was downstairs.

I'm a huge advocate for Detroit and love seeing more successes there.

The only mention of occupancy that I could find was an archived memo from 10 years ago, with a nebulous statement about how "generally, three non-relatives is okay," or something along those lines.I'm currently living in a 3BR SFH with three other people; my landlord says there is zero guidance and occupancy is not something that is ever enforced, even during her previous appearances in eviction court.This is mind-blowing to me, as a refugee from another college town with absurd anti-landlord & anti-AirBnB rules (cough, cough Auburn, AL).

its a shame how many joe-blow LOs are out there spewing out misinformation. 

http://www.dre.ca.gov/files/pdf/forms/re860.pdfFor fractionalized loan in CA this is the form that must be used... this is as you may or may not be aware the most vulnerable position a lender can be in.notary of the docs is standard NOT THE NOTE  just the Deed of trust and offers no special protection other than the person who signed it has been witnessed by a notary.read the form VERY carefully that the state of CA provides.. suggest you talk with attorney on this.I normally am not one to advocate attorneys on the west coast for vanilla deals.. but there is a significant amount of risk in this deal.you will want an intercreditor agreement with the first lender.See many BP post when these don't go well and they have no agreement up front with first lender.

I also advocate for asking for the seller to pay some closing costs and inflating the purchase price by that amount if allowed.

Brian Hoyt For what it's worth, I had 3 appraisals blow up this summer.