I saw them quite thoroughly and loudly, as my biased memory fondly recalls in these bleak later years...On a related matter, this one time, I had the cops toss a doctor out of one of my properties.

Now prices have soared and returns are minimal and inventory is low.

Any of you have any luck getting a good return consistently and with any potential for scale inside Washington State?

You can also expect at least 20% down if not 25% down so those are pretty good terms. 3.5% is well below market for ivestor property so again better than average returns. 

Sometimes garbage is exactly that...but sometimes you can see that diamond in the rough and be able to polish it up and the returns will  be great!!

We are only required to return the amount  of the actual deposit less damages with an itemized list within 30 days of vacancy AND a forwarding address. 

This has proven ineffective as most of these properties' income can barely sustain themselves [even with a "larger" (20%-30%) amount of equity down] and the ones that do have worse returns and higher risk than if you were to put money into a CD, for example. 

The deal he's offering is that I cover the entire cost of the 5% down deposit and renovation cost (closing, miscellaneous, etc.) and in return, we each pull 12k annually.

However, the trust may be a revocable living trust that does not have a tax id and file it's own returns. 

@Samuel Carmichael besides what @Brandon Ingegneri said about looking at absolute dollar amounts to figure out if it's even worth the aggravation, I also agree with @Michinori Kaneko about looking at percentages.Personally I look at percentages first, namely 1) cash on cash return (yearly money back after all expenses including mortgage, divided by all money invested to get it rentable) and 2) debt service coverage ratio (net income after operating expenses but before mortgage payment, divided by the mortgage payment).The first is (obviously) a measure of return, while the second is more of a measure of risk as it tells you how much of a buffer you have between the property's net income and the monthly fixed mortgage payment.After you get a little more experience you'll also start to factor things like replacement reserves into account.