I questioned him on it and he insisted that he had done numerous tile jobs and this was the correct way to do it. 

Tim G. it was probably someone who saw too many episodes of Storage Wars.

From what I read and understand by your post, I would not have an interest in enabling your plan for numerous reasons.Primarily, legal exposure and being associated with the possibility of other family members feeling left out, cheated, etc.

Although not typically a fan of painted brick, We have painted the bricks on numerous houses, I can email you a couple examples if interested.You can also use a stone veneer, if you want to make some impact, we do this frequently with fireplaces.

I've done this with sellers/buyers in numerous other states.

So me a REIT that can take my low value REO in war zones and offer me a fair price and they make money, that is a trading partner everyone wants.

I have been watching the market and it looks very over heated here with properties going up in price and getting snagged in bidding wars.

If you have some cash on hand you want to put somewhere to get it working for you, this could be a good opportunity (depending on numerous other risk factors).

Our main focus will be investing in multi-family/condo/townhouse properties branching into SFRs and eventually land development.My father-in-law currently owns 90 properties and is about to start developing land and building numerous units.

And our motto became bread and butter or better.We still ran into a lot of opportunities in the war zones but we just had a list of investors that worked those areas and we would just pass them off for a few bucks.