Then as I did a few improvements and took over tasks, like snow plowing and mowing the lawn, which the prvious landlord had them do, I raised their rent.

Hey Bill, you have the unique perspective of being both a govermental bureacrat and an enterpreneur.

Landlords are having to find different and unique uses to lease their space, and a lot of the time these retailers can't pay significant rents.

The person who did the webinar happens to be a marketer, however, he does have a great story about failure and success he shared when he went bankrupt and made many mistakes that was helpful to me and getting me to consider hire out some of my tasks because I am extremely overwhelmed with everything I need to do to be a REI and a full time mom and homeschooler.

It would mean for instance finding properties that can be purchased for 25k rented for 500 month and would return 12% based on 250 monthly cost for taxes insurance maintenance management etc. . this is not an easy task and it would mean finding and purchasing 25 new properties.

My current task is to update the processes since they are out of date by a few years.

buying property with a partner who i was emotionally tied to, then she needed to occupy the property. getting money from her became a task like pulling teeth. needless to say she hardly ever paid. so in the between times of us not having tenants i paid the full balance of the mortgage. on top of all else our relationship began to sour and work needed to be done on the property but i didn't want to be around her so i was reluctant to do what i needed to do to make the deal work. point is; no more emotional partnerships. they do more damage than good. and someone is going to lose!

Although each deal is unique, I've been starting to demand a personal guarantees tied to costs that go above and beyond "value adders"

you just have to offer enough so that it pays off the mortgages..not saying these deals are impossible to find, but they are few and far between...most leads that call you will be overleveraged and underwater (shortsale situations)...there will be some where you will have to be creative, as in sub2, owner finance, etc...then finally, there will be a few hopefully that don't owe a lot, but have a ton of equity, and don't want the hassle of fixing up the property to cash in on the equity, or listing with a realtor...again, it will take a lot of leads to find this unique seller..good luck!

Then post a job on elance.com to have it made using the website you like as an example for the programmer, you can also include additional features you require in the task list.They have tons of Indian programmers (dot, not feather) on elance that can build you a custom website with a database backend very inexpensively.