Also there are a handful of San Francisco Bay Area BP'ers who have started meeting informally to network and exchange ideas.

Offer to look at properties for them in exchange for him/her teaching you how to evaluate deals, estimate costs, etc.

Besides the normal precautions with having a tenant do work in exchange for rent, would you advise installing granite in a rental?

The only way around it is a 1031 exchange.

your friend told you that bad guys make a u-turn at 79th..so you should be fine on 85th…moving on..winter, 10 degrees outside, heating does not work …current owner/landlord cant be located, his LLC has an address that leads to a barbershop on 79th and Exchange ..nobody knows the landlord there ..what the tenants do..well they call the city ..they are freezing, heating system does not work …what does the city do ..they send somebody to fix it…HVAC guy charges the city, city charges the building recording the so called SUPER lien..what it means ..the new prospective owner (YOU !)

Tracking down to the individual parts is virtually unheard of in construction precisely because it's so tedious and expensive to do it.Problem 2 - Make people buy things on separate receipts and mark the receipts for each job.Quickbooks premier is about the best off-the-shelf solution you're going to get without spending huge bucks on a custom program.

Suggest you run this past your attorney as there maybe additional concerns they have over the wording:The value of any preferred equity interest in the Company (as listed inSchedule A), will be calculated at the time of the buy-back, such that, in total,the Company will distribute a return on the initial capital contributed for thepreferred equity interest, that equates to an annual return from cashdistributions and the proceeds of the exchange of the Member interests of25% per annum, or the annual cash distribution plus 10% of the capitalcontribution per annum, whichever is greater.

Software like Argus and/or customized spreadsheets can given you precise data if you feel like your crystal ball is better than the next investors' ball.

What about a scenario where the investor contributes the lot and/or some capital and you do the work in exchange for an equity share?

I just explain that I buy real estate, making the transaction as easy on the seller as possible, and in exchange expect to purchase it below market value.