@Loren Whitney  & @Dmitriy Fomichenko .......From what I am hearing you guys say about depreciation within a SDIRA, it sounds like (I could very well be interpreting it wrong too) that IF a person was to use leverage within the SDIRA, that somewhat or mostly negates peoples argument 'that there is no benefit to hold real estate within a SDIRA' (meaning no depreciation benefit).

Unless you (1) would prefer to pay a company to interpret the data, or (2) you're planning to   Go door to door to count population yourself, you're unlikely to get better data than the US Census.  

I don't disagree with the article but I don't think that interpretation was your intention as you wrote it.Thanks,Matt

im not sure. i bought the project, funded to project and so on. i had no credit in 04 (19 at the time) and my partner had little built up credit, the seller/lender agreed to sell only if i provided someone with credit. im waiting to sell summer of 06 because of the two year mark for capital gains.am i interpreting the capital gains all wrong?

What I do find challenging though, is that unless they can interpret the inspection, lots of little things that need repair might translate to the investor that there is too much wrong with the house, where in fact they are small, inexpensive fixes.I have also had deals where my buyers opted to save their $300 and got saddled with some big expensive fixes that would have been caught in an inspection, and we could have renegotiated the price of the deal or had the seller fix the problems.A friend of mine, and quite a seasoned investor, purchased a house from the president of her REI group, and trusted him to give her a sound house.

It's not a motivational book, but rather one that's designed to teach you how to interpret pro formas and how to do and understand key calculations that are essential for success in real estate investing.And for fun I teach once each year at Columbia in their Master of Science in Real Estate Development program.I've been in the real estate software business long enough to have learned that there's no point in trying to sell people analysis software if they don't have a good grasp of the financial concepts that underly real estate investments.

Question: How do I interpret the info on Zillow and is it reliable?

It sounds as though there would be additional investment required to execute the blueprint and I wanted to make sure I was interpreting this aspect correctly.

Do you interpret this wording to mean that the pm can compel me to evict even if I really don't want to?

Some tenants will interpret the lease to their own benefit, disregarding the reality of what it says.I do what Ann does though, and I like how she worded it - no financing of the security deposit.