Fast forward to present time, I never got to complete the house and lost over $200K on the deal. 

Hello everyone,I am a newbie to the whole real estate investment world and am looking to move on my first property if possible.

One of our goals is to invest in real estate for short term and long term rental use.  

I'm Rene and I'm a community manager here at BP so feel free to reach out at any time!

Hey @Devin Bost, so if I need to ship something direct, I just ship it to my lake house and my neighbor will go and put it in the garage for me.I then let my cleaner know about whatever it is, usually toiletries and the like, so she can put them away.I am about 7 hours away from our rental so I do drive over 2-3 times a year to take a look, make small repairs and stock up stuff.

Also the person we fund is not under a time crunch to try to get the deals to work  and has to run their business partner through the houses which we know is not their business partner just a litnay of white lies these guys tell sellers..

Appraisal for post renovation is 5.5 million.1 million equity for one deal and around 9,000 per month in cash flow once stabilized is life changing to me, along with the cost segregation.You can make money in real estate in so many ways, whether you're @Jay Hinrichs funding deals and developing, or @Brian Burke syndicating, or wholesaling, buying single family homes, fixing and flipping, short term rentals, etc.The key is to pick you vehicle and master it.I would be remiss to say that I believe multifamily is the holy grail of real estate investing.

Sure it can be a write off, but my question is if it is the highest and best use of your time (or the given employees time) to be running a skid steer - transporting it, storage, maintenance, cleaning, etc, and if it still makes sense if you need to hire someone to run it for you and take care of the other things.Add up all those recurring costs - maintaining the machine, maintaining the trailer, having a large enough truck to tow it, insurance and registration for all of the above, your time or your employees time related to all of the above...even at $14k a year it might be attractive enough to keep paying that and having them drop it off at the job site for you.A brand new machine could easily cost you over 6 figures - that's 7 years of rentals at $14k/year before including all the holding costs. 

I am hoping to learn a lot and find local real estate investors. 

You are saying I should ask for the seller to carry 80% seller finance and then I make payments to him with 5% interest for a period of time until I pay it off correct?