You will need to pay for insurance (and I would want the utilities on)during that time.

Our current plan is to just apply all the net rents (cash reserves already established)and all the extra money from our paychecks to pay the debt off in about 12 to 18 months.

Got a call from the tenant that the utility company couldn't find the house to transfer the utilities(no mailbox and numbers pulled off the house for exterior painting :O).

Because taxes are low here and I only look at places with tenant paid utilities, I drop the ratio down to 1.5 - 1.8% personally.

My fun is in rehabbing properties - so far I've only held as rentals but would like to be able to acquire some properties that would make good flips as well.I have a background in construction and my brother is a general contractor - so I get some pretty good deals on vendors and materials (most of his vendors do work for high end home builders as well).For the last 10 years, I've also had my TX RE sales license but have not done too many deals utilizing it.

Tenants pay their own utilities.

Walls, floors, siding, counters, utils, etc.

I called the utility co. and the property I'm going to see has the power turned off right now.

I've come to my senses and am in the process of trying to establish a systematic approach to doing one.

The agent has no idea if the tenents have even been paying rent in the past year or anything about leases.We are worried about establishing any info on tenants if we buy the building.