I was at a trade show as a vendor when a local investor that knew of me walked up promoting a contract he recently received on a light industrial complex.

I would appreciate it if you could shed some light on this for me as it's extremely frustrating to have to come out of pocket almost $25K more than I was told initially and have spent over thousands of dollars on appraisal and inspection feels -- not to mention all of my own personal time I have put in.I also have $10K deposit at stake and my financing contingency expires in less than a week, Friday, December 29th.

UNLESS yoru doing volume if your buying 1 or 2 houses in a year its going to be a challenge.Now I know when I build new construction I do maybe 35 homes a year personally.. we look at lot cost vertical cost of money to build  sales cost and what our profit we can make.. we factor that in before we bid on the lots you have to back into it based on end sales price.. you can't just build it and they will come and or it will appraise.. with the goal to make 10 to 15% on gross and if we do better than 15% that is a huge win for us.. but of course these are 400k and up.. so numbers are bigger but so is the risk. and we can't be like a high volume turn key company that does our yearly production in a month or two.I fund a few VEndors that do a turn key light ( is what I call it) they will let you pay cash for the house and they will charge you a fee to use their rehab crews and coordinate it all. then hand you off to PM.the reason PM is critical in turn key is you have a tenant base that is some what of a challenge to manage.. other wise none of these turn key guys would be in the business of PM unless they were going nuclear and growing it so big that it becomes a profit center in its own right.I hope some of this makes sense. its simply not a big mystery you have certain components that go into bringing a product to market and make it financeable.

We are going to replace the ceiling fan and light fixtures, and spruce up the backyard landscaping. 

Rich Dad, Poor Dad is probably the best book for helping people to see money, real estate and assets in general in a different light. 

Check light bulbs and things like that.

Repainting all the buildings and re doing some exterior lighting along with a code change issues that we were just notified of. 

The ratio thing doesn’t really work here but you can look into submetering the meter that is supplying the common area.Just a random thought, I’m not sure of your specific situation but say your common area has two lights both of which are fed from the unit 1 breaker box (2 dIfferent circuits).

@Dmitriy Fomichenko and @ brian Eastman may shed some light for you with more information.

That is a major flashing light to attract a suite.