An excellent book on due diligence: Brian Hennessey - The Due Diligence Handbook For Commercial Real Estate: A Proven System To Save Time, Money, Headaches And Create Value When Buying Commercial Real EstateIt's reasonably in-depth but a lot of this stuff one learns from experience.

I am saving money too.

I am saving money too.

@Seham Afaghani There's sooooooo much research and learning to do out there- Let me save you a bunch of time that I had wasted over 2 years ago and recommend you get your mind off of rental properties in Sacramento.

I would hope that someone is willing to partake in this sort of partnership.By the way, I live in the Los Angeles area, and I retire at the end of the month and am seriously looking to do this.Hopefully, someone out there is willing to take the lead and partner with me once or twice.

You could also try target marketing, where you run ads in selected publications or locations to go for a specific market (like retired people, military, etc).  

Initial CapEx Funding at property closing: At closing, as part of my 'cash needed to close' calculation, I take 3% of the sales price and set it aside in a separate CapEx savings account.  

@Rob Gervais  Getting some 3D Renderings and basic floor plans with details could help communicate your thoughts to the GC which would ultimately save you money and also could help you get through the permit process.  

Millions of people lost their life savings.

What I do is offfer my angry tennants the opportunity to get into real estate investing, offer them work in maintaining properties, collecting rents, and offer guidance on them being able to buy their first place of their own.Don't you think they would love to have at minimum two jobs to be able to save up the money , work their ends off to build up their credit, hunt down deals, and negotiate a purchase, invest their money knowing there is no guarantee of ever getting your money out of it or of profiting, have to spend thousands of dollars or 10's of thousands of dollars, even hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to be a ble to provide others with housing?