Right now you are just hoping your seller doesn't get a judgement attached to 'your' houses.Conventional loans are pretty easy (small amounts aside) to get up to 4. 

The good news is it's usually it's pretty easy to get rid of tenants with a weekly lease. 

Get your name and face out in the public this way as it is pretty cheap to do and gives you an opportunity to learn from others and build your network.

But with rule of thumbs like the 50% rule, it looks pretty good.I'm using a combination of the BP calculator and the 4 square method to analyze this, but I'm wondering if there are more experienced investors out there who could help me out and see how I can improve and what I might be missing in my calculations. 

There are “fire chasers” in the construction trade, people who offer you a value for your house - for example, while your house is up in flames, they are real estate investors or wholesalers in a sense. if someone is making money out of it, pretty sure anyone can.

I have some pretty big goals, as we all do starting out.

So, my girlfriend is apparently pretty interested in learning about REI. 

They are probably pretty formulaic.

We are in a dual agency representation with the real estate agent and she was pretty forthright about how she valued the property - it is basically based on one lot comp in the same town from april, she multiplied that x2 (the lot is a bit over twice the size of the other lot that sold recently) - there have been no sales of land since then and the closest one before that was a full year ago.

If you file it with your return you can get a refund check from the IRS, sometimes a pretty big one.