It's not the Wild West anymore and there are laws, regulations, rules as well as ethics.

I would think most these coastal areas are pretty good, at least I know that in the SW section things are very good as far as rentals go.The problem you may have is that the prices are rising fast and you may not find properties at what is discussed on BP as a good price or rule of thumb for rentals.Areas in SW Florida which are good include Naples, some sections of Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte.

As an entrepreneur I felt to constrained by all the rules.

Very simple rule but for a new investor I never would have thought about that myself.

You can go a short sale route, might negotiate a lower payoof or purchase the note (covered here on BP) and then have the owner give you the property, maybe with a little cash to them to boot, or wait for the foreclosure.One caution, you can approach someone who is late on payments, but once notice of foreclsoure is sent to the borrower new rules apply.

Hi,I'm new to this forum and I come from Geneva, Switzerland in Europe, I found a lot of very interesting informations and rules, like the 50% and the 2% rules, on BiggerPockets but it seems to be impossible to invest in my local market with these rules so I registred to try to see what you, US expert, thinks about the situation in Geneva and what I should/can do here.First things First, in Switzerland everything is expensive, and housing is specialy expensive in Geneva since we have a lot of banks, international companies, NGO and even the United Nations who brings a lot of very high paid employes to our city.The whole Switzerland is probably smaller than most states in the US and Geneva is a small state in Switzerland.

But according to Scorp IRS rules distributions need to be split up according to capital contribution (shares) in the business (75%/25%).In your example if the majority partner wanted to keep his 50/50 ordinary income to distribution split, the minority partner would be forced to take 41.67K salary 8.33K distribution.

(I also hope I'm not violating any rules here by posting this, if I am, I'll remove it)

There is a lot you will need to know about the property to determine if it is a good deal for you or not though to include:- rent history - vacancy rate- current lease terms- expenses (operating expenses, insurance, taxes, etc) - market value of the property- property conditionOnce you know more you can apply the 50% rule to determine what the long term expenses will be.

I'm still new at investing, but when people focus so much on appreciation I can't help but think back to 2008 with the bubble.For me, I'd do a typical analysis w/ the 50% rule and look for a property that cash flows at least $100 a month.