Swinging in these cities are big costs and extremely high risk. 

That $50-100 nightstand will cost 2-3X+ more once you factor in the labor for someone to assemble it, multiplied by 2 for every bedroom.

Until you have a locked loan estimate from both lenders you don't know what they're really offering.

This requires about seven permits to shut down a four-lane street for over a week, with an estimated cost of $60,000 due to the need to dig 12 feet deep.I’m reaching out to this community to ask if anyone has faced a similar infrastructure challenge or has experience dealing with such extensive utility work.

Rehab project was supposed to cost $50k.

The biggest mistake I see is to worry too much about the cost of things like lawn mowing and water bill and the exact percentage for vacancies, but not being enough aware of the general condition of the property - resulting in 20k, 50k or more in capex a few years down the road.My advice: look for a quality property that has all the big-ticket items already done.

Once the problem is resolved, find a qualified PM company and transfer the management.A lawyer is going to cost drastically more than $28 per month.

See here a couple diagrams to help you in this quest:Asset Protection Decision Diagram - to help assess the need for asset protection, and what to implement : https://www.biggerpockets.com/files/user/CosIorg/file/asset-protection-decision-diagramAsset Protection Onion Diagram - what, when and at what cost one should implement in terms of asset protection - https://www.biggerpockets.com/files/user/CosIorg/file/asset-protection-onion-diagram-v2

This isnt true -- but with anything, convenience costs. 

So they take a 4 bedroom house and make it a 6 or 7 bedroom, which will cost you money to do initially.