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There are a lot of people in this note investing business who pretend to be experts. 

In addition to appreciation potential, there are a bunch of tax benefits to consider as well... my favorite being that a tax loss can be carried forward to offset future taxable income.

POH are a part of our industry whether you keep them, sell them or tear them down. 

We do live in a rural area and some contractors we spoke with said it was too far of a drive to do the project.

Our area sees a lot of VA home loans, so we're used to them.  

The conversation process in some areas is expensive and the timeline can be pretty lengthy while you're waiting for the process to be approved.

In my case, I have residential rentals in one LLC, commercial properties in another, self storage in a third, and my real estate company operates in a fourth.

I would call some local leasing brokers in your area before you have any non-refundable earnest money to get an idea of the tenant demand for something like this and if you are new to retail leasing/investments I would highly recommend you hire one of those brokers to negotiate the lease for you.

At first, we talked about Airbnbs (especially their profitability at the time) and self-storage units.