If you do get stuck with Citizens remember they only offer 100K liability, you'll have to buy an excess liability policy from another carrier to get higher amounts.When buying a property here, allow for the expenses of updates to make the property insurable.

For the numbers people....12k mi yr/3 yr600 down ( including first month payment )250 mo (includes tax and excess wear/tear)500 back from hyundai800 back PGE2500 back from stateand I use about 80/mo in electricity for about 1k mi mo..

I too wanted to dive into REI, but I'd rather wait another year or two than start while the poor decisions of my excessive CC spending could impact my success.

Of course, I'm a buy and hold guy stuck on cash flow and am not too keen on excessive speculation on appreciation.

Also, I like the pet rent to cover me against excess damage overall.

The gist of what they do is, they go into business with a seller to attempt to sell the property they are trying to discharge, and they get the seller the money they ask and anything in excess of that price, belongs to them.

Then by the time there was capital there was no longer an employee market from tech to support this outlayer project (think Inland Empire to Los Angeles comparison).Three major Bay area submarkets would have supported this (not to mention Santa Clarita) and not one lender would touch this based on the state of the tech industry, alone.We were lucky to flip out of the project to a substantial home builder who had excess capital capacity.The entire region is heavily dependent on the technology industry. 

This seems to make more sense as we could probably pull out some of that $500K cash we already have in the property (although likely leave in a fat downpayment of 200K-300K).

Maybe I'm old school, but I go by the sayings "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered" or "You can shear a sheep many times, but skin him only once" or "Nobody minds if you make a living, they just don't want you to make a killing".I realize many in business don't share my opinion. 

Some VA's have specialties and it may work out in your favor to hire one that already has experience in the areas that you are seeking, to avoid excessive time spent with training.