You should check out banks and credit unions as well as non-traditional lenders.  

Hello everyone - I'm nearly retired and looking seriously at real-estate to diversify some retirement funds out of the traditional financial markets by using Self Directed IRA(s).  

You need to figure that the debt added to your balance sheet for an MBA will be between $30K+ from an online school to at least $60K+ from a traditional school (non-Ivy League), which is in addition to the cost of the undergraduate degree.

If they are titled in your personal name you can also refinance them using traditional FNMA 30 yr fixed loans

The theory is that I'm going to get a stronger and stronger income stream documented through the Corporation that will be enough to qualify for traditional Fannie Mae financing in a year or so.

I always felt I was doing my tenants a pretty good service by doing a traditional lease option (even when I used to collect $5K+ as a non-refundable option fee and some inflated future value for the option price).

Properties like this, where you can't get any traditional (and apparently some non-traditional) acquisition funding can drop significantly in price because there is no acquisition funding.

Traditional lenders are not willing to do a conventional loan until the foundation is taken care of.

HMLs are more expensive as far as fees go, and the interest is higher, but these types of loans are usually easier to get for real estate investors as they are more asset based than borrower qualification (like traditional financing). 

The downside of pulling pieces aimed at individual bits of home automation is now you have a bunch of unrelated systems that do not play nice or scale together.I've eschewed the Honeywell thermostats as they are propretary and Honeywell has a long tradition of not playing well with others.When I started down this road five years ago, there was not very little from which to choose.