It's a townhome built in 2016 that's currently owned by a married couple in their mid 50s.

I know a couple guys in my home town that served 5+ years in a federal prison for this.If you're moving ownership into a land trust that you also control and have no intention of defaulting or selling and avoiding the payoff, it could for sure be argued as positive fraud, but the intent would more likely be for something like asset protection or some kind of investment arbitrage - which could still be fraud.  

So there is a built in discount 

I am in a similar situation as you where I do want to add value and also have a place for my out of town family/friends to stay when the visit.

We both know you wont cash flow as a rental (maybe via airbnb/STR, but those HOA fees in the loop are a deal breaker) and too much new inventory is being built.

Also note that if you were to purchase the property from them, your purchase price would become YOUR basis in the property and if you're paying below market prices, then you have a built in gain as well that would be recognized when you sell it if you sell for more than what you paid for it.I have the names of CPAs/attorneys if you need, though they're mostly in San Diego and Southern California.

I'd rather turn it into a nice patio area/study area (since it's in a college town).

The distribution centers recently built by Amazon and U-Line on the I-94 corridor are gigantic.

Hello BP,I have been wanting to ask this questions for about a year now, and have finally built up the guts to get some help on this topic.

So I've built a financial model that I help investors like yourself analyze anything from the smaller SFR to multi million dollar apartment complexes.