HUD issued guidance about this very thing a couple years ago.

I'm going to be a bit of a contrarian to the above posters, but let me first qualify my post by stating that your market will determine what you should do.We frequently install en-suite laundry in our units - in fact, we have removed common coin-op laundry in most buildings of 6-units or less in favour of en-suite laundry - for the following reasons:electricity and, in most cases, hot water costs are transferred to the tenant;where water is sub-metered, water costs are transferred to the tenant;high-efficency residential laundry machines are about half the capital costs of commercial coin-operated machines;we can command $30 - $50/month in additional rent with en-suite laundry;by installing our own machines, we know they are installed property, with catch/drain pans and {going forward} leak detect shutoffs; andwith en-suite laundry vandalism of laundry machines has been non-existant ... and if a machine is damaged, we know who is responsible.We have a good rapport with a couple of local appliance suppliers and get called whenever they have "dinged and scratched" units to unload ... a small, cosmetic dent in the side of a washer - which will never be seen when it is installed in a laundry closet - can be worth a 40 - 50% discount.  

Unless you're trying to do an immediate flip, I as an investor would like to see solid cashflow as well if you're talking about a couple years for the end goal.

After a couple times, just tell them you need to get off the phone now.

A couple of pros to the commercial is ease of transaction and building a relationship.  

Been learning and reading as much as I can these past couple weeks and am looking to make my first purchasing within the next 2-3 months.

I own a couple rentals in Oklahoma City, currently have four leases, and I’m already wanting to throw my small 3 foot high filing cabinet I bought at Walmart in a burning garbage can...including all contents.  

I went over and found lots of water there, they said that it had been like that for a couple of days, but they aren't down there much and didn't notice until it started smelling. 

Thanks for the feedback on my previous post.We have a rental house that was purchased thru Morris Invest, the property is located in Detroit MI.We purchased the house in March/April, and up until a couple of weeks we had no idea what was going on with the house.

It's next door to Boeing (walking/biking distance), 1hr North of Amazon in Seattle, 45 min North of Microsoft, only a couple hours South of Canada, and it's growing.