Buying commercial space in non-performing industries and converting to possible future performing industries could be a great play.

I then hired a company to perform a home inspection and give me a report of everything wrong with the house so I would have a punch list of things to work on.Upon seeing the report, my 22 y.o. son, at the time not employed and looking for something to do, asked if I would consider letting he and his friend (also 22 y.o. but with several years construction experience and at the time "between gigs") do many of the repairs. 

As a disqualified person to your IRA, you may perform very basic and limited administrative activities, but you may not personally benefit nor may you inject value into the IRA via the provision of goods or services. 

At a high level, it appears that you just need higher yielding assets to which you can perform like-kind exchanges.

Your issues with your GC not performing as desired could potentially be smoother by implementing contracts/agreements that are signed and professional.

After some years of reading about real estate, I started to develop some general guidelines to follow when it comes to correctly measuring performance in real estate, especially since I wanted to compare performances of other investments such as stocks, bonds, etc. 

I’d find their listing on Airbnb and see how it’s performing.

Unless you have specific items in your lease that they need to perform there is nothing you can do about how they keep their home. 

If you were to perform a cost segregation study, you could depreciate the assets included in the purchase that have shorter useful lives much more quickly which helps increase your cash flow of the property.

@Yoselin Pearce I'd encourage you to look into school zones, and target high performing school zones!