Now that you have achieved the goal of paying down debt you can leverage your good credit to obtain either personal lines of credit or if you have equity in your personal home you may leverage that as down payment money on a acquisition loan or use that to purchase low costing investment property, depending on what market(s) you are looking to invest in.I've personally was in your same position and used personal loans to outright buy investment properties in various markets and I wish I would have known about lines of credit prior to getting involved with loans.

However, I have been unable to close because the seller failed to disclose the litigation between them and a 3rd party abutter who sued him when he started to perform sitework.

My wife Aradia and I are a few years out from retiring from the military and have decided to get involved with real estate investing.

The key is to build long term relationships that understand each other and are beneficial to both parties.

The IRS generally opposes self-dealing and can assess sizable penalties on both the business entity and the individual involved in the transaction. 

@Jessica GeislerTechnically, getting paid a fee for connecting two parties that leads to a transaction is called brokering.

You are probably right and both parties would have been better off as a result.

However, I have to scrub through all the notices to check if there is any real estate involved in the distribution. 

.- I made the transition from residential to commercial a few years ago and I love it, because of the more passive aspects involved. 

From an operations stand point, make sure the quote from the contractor includes — full containment and HEPA filtered negative air movers that ideally can exhaust to the exterior, manometer with print out logs documenting the containment’s negative pressure throughout the mitigation, full removal of affected materials (drywall, baseboard), (wood framing can sometimes be sanded and then sprayed with a spor/fungicide), and finally an *inspection by a third party environmental hygienist for air clearance*.