Here are the numbers:SFH; All brick in a nice neighborhood3BR/1.5 BA 1,210 sq ftBuilt: 1972She paid: $29K for it in Aug 08Tax Assessment: $75,992Comps: (Trulia): $36K hi/$32K low (Real Estate ABC) $60K/$34KRents for: $750/month.

This was harder to do when I was building an estate; now that I am more in the mode of protecting an estate I can afford to pass on partners and deals that present those kind of risks.Not the ideal environment to support business startups that create jobs, but just a realistic assessment of where we stand today.

The best way to assess a market is to actually sell something and see how it sells.

Special assessments have been issued in many complexes where HOA dues have dropped and they need to repair something etc.

I do need to get some suggestion regarding my situation.Couple of month ago, one of my properties is damaged by the evicted tenant and my property manager was working hard on evicting the tenant, contacting the power company to inspect the rehab cost and attorney to get the tenant evicted etc.After checking with the damage with insurance company, I got much less than the total repair cost that property manager proposed when he assessed the property so I started to shop around the repair vendors that offers the cheapest cost.

The remaining 50% should be enough to cover your principle and interest payments and hopefully leave a little extra for you.Don't place too much faith in the tax assessment.

-Get tax info (schedule E, C etc) for past several years; -copies of leases AND rental applications (leases generally do not have dob or social security info you may need later to evict)-profit and loss statement - you can usually verify a lot from the local county/state tax assessment website (i.e. water bill, property taxes); contact gas & electric for accurate 1-year monthly average-get permits/licenses: make sure the property is compliant before-hand with lead permits and any state/city lead or multi-unit licenses and inspections-of course the inspection will tell you what kind of deferred maintenance there may be and what you can be looking at laying out the next few years -if you are buying the company (such as an LLC which in turn owns the company) then have an experienced title attorney who handles these also run lien search on both company and property, and update all appropriate filings.

How about finding true tax assessments?

My wife's friend, her daughter, is not interested as she lives with her family on the east coast.The local assessor has assessed it at $500K for tax purposes.It has not been inhabited since 1986, other than a walk around and through once every couple of years.

That works a little differently for a condo, but all those same expenses occur and go into the HOA fees and special assessments.