Move on with your lifeHowever, for options 1-3 to be viable, the judgment needs to be large enough to be worth the effort. 

The previous owner then saw an  opportunity to sell it for more than it was worth before because a developer can turn it into a much larger asset and make a lot of money. 

Or use the $300k as the typical 20% down, would give you $1.50 million in buying power.

These expenses would be reported on Schedule E (Supplemental Income and Loss) of your tax return.Since you incurred these expenses before you started renting out your property, you can typically depreciate the cost of the furnishings and any improvements made to the property over their useful life.

Typically the "owner" of the "firm," on paper, is simply a Loan Officer or Branch Manager, and all "his" employees are actually Loan Officer Assistants with pay-stubs that say "XYZ Lending" on them.

It hasn’t been perfect, but looking back, it has been worth it.

I k ow that anything that sounds tempting has a catch in it, so I was wondering if there's anyone here who has experience with renting his / her properties to traveling nurses, that can share the experience or just the bottom line - if it's worth it or not ?

Big enough to be worth the squeeze, but smaller than most institutional + no anchor.I am a CRE lawyer for those types of deals, we help with PSA, NNN leasing, etc.

So I would think the property is worth more like 600K-650K.

Then tell the agent to run comps for ARV based on updates you do.And you also said you can't afford to lose $20-30k, the most seasoned flippers/investors lose money all the time, and ultimately that is part of your education costs, hopefully you don't make any costly mistakes, but you have to run your numbers well enough to make sure there is some 'ooops' fund to help shield you from that.As for comps, typically, appraisers want them to be in the same neighborhood, within 15% same square footage, same # beds/baths and age.