@Jay HinrichsLol you are certainly correct about that.Real estate needs its own dictionary and bible of character stories lol so everyone can see the light lol

Reserves and the ability to pay big bills are not a joke, or something to be taken lightly, stuff goes wrong ALL THE TIME, a lot of times it's the worst and most stressful time!    

We go in and clean out the crawl space set new lighting in the full crawl space, normally 6 to 18 lights.

If that house was built to allow either an electric or a gas range, there will probably be a normal 120 V outlet behind the range, that was designed to run the oven light and timer on a gas range. 

Stress that this is an informal meeting, and you do not want to take up too much of their time.Come prepared to the meeting, keep the tone light, and look for ways to make personal connections as well as business opportunities.

When we were younger, we moved into a string of owner occupied light fixer properties, improved them and sold after 2 years, obtaining the capital gains exclusion.  

Can someone shed some light on this?

David that is such a broad question.Shopping centers vary by age.Generally everything recycles after so many years.For instance if a shopping center is 40 or 50 years old it is past it's life cycle.Generally at that point you tear it down and build new.If a shopping center is say 20 years old many will just reface the outside to make it look new and repaint and re-stripe the parking lots.This is all predicated on if the shopping center still has a viable location or has growth shifted and now the center is int he old part of town.If it's in the old part of town refacing might not make sense and instead you buy at a lower basis to rent to Big Lots,outlet stores,etc. for less money.Still a tenant that will rent from you but at a lower cost because the area has shifted.With shopping centers it's all about the corner and access from 2 points,red lights,traffic volume and flow,etc.Anchored shopping center versus unanchored,tenant mix with credit rated tenant and frachise concepts versus mom and pop operations.Just like with houses you can run into big repairs with older shopping centers.Don't pay attention to current leases as much going in as what is market rent now and any leases fixing to reset.Also need to know level of shopping center saturation in a 2 mile radius depending and could be tighter or bigger in size depending on rural,subrurban,or urban core,and population count and demographic.Hope it helps.

@Ann HowellThank you for shining your bright light on these folks - it's the only thing that keeps them at bay.

My understanding of a pre-hab and they way we use the term is, either getting a property under contract or make the purchase and doing light work to make it more desirable to a re-habber.Example; we put a property under contract, evicted a non-lease tenant, and cleaned out the property of all trash.