Hey Joe I am a budding real estate investor on the Southside of Atlanta so I cannot help a whole lot with knowledge on the Northside of Atlanta other than I have heard that Rome and much of I-75 North of Atlanta is steadily growing and attracting more people.

If you leverage the state properly you can attract very good tenants that pay high rent. 

Goal: To attract prospects and turn them into qualified leads for real estate transactions.

We advertised it as a "bonus room/ office" and I think that helped attract the right applicants (they were not expecting a 3 bedroom apartment and then arriving to find out it was only 2 beds with an awkward bonus room).  

Sure it can be a write off, but my question is if it is the highest and best use of your time (or the given employees time) to be running a skid steer - transporting it, storage, maintenance, cleaning, etc, and if it still makes sense if you need to hire someone to run it for you and take care of the other things.Add up all those recurring costs - maintaining the machine, maintaining the trailer, having a large enough truck to tow it, insurance and registration for all of the above, your time or your employees time related to all of the above...even at $14k a year it might be attractive enough to keep paying that and having them drop it off at the job site for you.A brand new machine could easily cost you over 6 figures - that's 7 years of rentals at $14k/year before including all the holding costs. 

Scum attracts scum. 

For his firm, he has chosen to be compensated by managing traditional investment portfolios, so anyone using annuities would take away from his potential AUM so he tries to attract and convert them. 

Typically the biggest appeal to Tempe is from an attracting college student standpoint, so I was curious. 

These groups often continue to focus on the smaller investor, even when they may have the track record and infrastructure to attract institutional money.  

One route I've found attractive is possibly paying down all our debt, even mortgage, before going in on a property so we don't have the risk of losing our current home if something didn't go according to plan.