I would suggest brushing up on future and present value calculations as you start making offers, only because it will help you identify what your offer is in relation to what a cash offer would be.Couple rules of thumb I follow.#1.)

(a) A landlord may not charge a tenant a late fee for failing to pay rent unless:(1) notice of the fee is included in a written lease;(2) the fee is a reasonable estimate of uncertain damages to the landlord that are incapable of precise calculation and result from late payment of rent; and(3) the rent has remained unpaid one full day after the date the rent was originally due.

I'm not exactly sure how to go about calculating ARV.

Your best bet is to talk to family/friends/co-workers and ask them who they have use in the past.

I don't know how safe of a bet that is.

Probably your best bet is going to be if you can find someone that will owner finance you.

If you don't keep an eye on your property managers, they will do things like cut corners on upkeep to make profits look higher and then you will get stuck with a big money repair down the road.Maybe your better bet is commercial property with long term NNN leases.

And then some of the odd actions taken, which appear as smoke screens, like the fed's instituting a new way to calculate CPI that does not factor in 1/2 of the true mass market factors, so to appear that there is little to no inflation.

I bet you can create your own better marketing documents, including pitch book and projections and everything!!

My calculations say we might manage to get back $9-12K out of the original investment, along with the new money and the promised interest.OTOH, there's a real chance the whole mess does just linger and now I've thrown good money after bad.