You can take it in stride when your tenant trashes one of your houses because you had accounted for that bad egg by spreading the expense over all your properties.And when your tenants all behave and have extended stays in your houses you are pleasantly surprised.

At a minimum, it should start raise eyebrows that there are no set standards of effectiveness...no lessons learned that have been captured...from the thousands of existing HOAs that can be quite powerful in an individual's ability to own and use land.It's more of a curiousity.

That can be very cost effective if they know your focus and execute.

Can anyone point me to a great resource for really effective check lists or questionnaires when speaking to a motivated seller or looking at a potential property?

Whether it is fsbo or not has no effect on how to run the comps.

I'm asking because I don't want to pour money into making very professional business cards if simply using a free vistaprint.com template or my own printer and a business card sheet from Office Max will do.Also, what things are effective in a REI's business card (besides the contact information)?

Then again, I have no idea how effectively these people used the live leads, so who knows.

I call him Monday morning, he freaks, asks me what I expect, tells me all his apartments are rented "as is," and makes some comment to the effect that this is why he doesn't like to rent to white people.

You end up fine for those five years (assuming my restaurant doesn't go under) but if I leave when the lease is up you are now stuck with what is effectively a $500K property for which you paid $750K, and you'll be unlikely to get a tenant who is going to come in and pay above-market rent.

If so how does that effect the appraisal.