(read the coastal areas that created the current market bubble.)If you are in a rural town in the heartland chances are that you can buy a piece of property with a house on it and it's going to be the house that drives up the land at a steady rate keeping pace or slightly out pacing inflation (contractors prices are going up lately because of gas prices).If you buy the same house on the coast chances are it will be worth lots more because of the location of the land it is sitting on.

I prefer keeping all properties seperated from all other deals.When you borrow against equity to buy your next then borrow more equity for the next etc your creating the proverbial house of cards.

On the other hand, the business owner, who hires employees (property managers, contractors, etc) to do the work for them, comes back to find their business more profitable than when they left.Mike does his own PM, repairs, etc. etc. which creates a situation in that if he is not there, there is no one to answer the phone call about the exploded water heater at 2am.

Do you find them to help or create more of a burden?

Get our logo created.

The best advice I can give you is to save your money and time and focus that on creating yourself a job that you love to do.

If so, you're likely one of the best landlords in the country, and I would recommend buying much larger apartment buildings/complexes where you can make a LOT more money...My biggest concern based on your answers is that if you're doing all the work yourself (leasing, maintenance, turn-over, landscaping, evictions, etc), you're probably spending at least a third of time time (if not a lot more) on this one property, and this one property is only earning you $20K per year.So, you basically have created a job for yourself, that's earning you less than $60K/year.

Hard money loans work well for this if you can avoid up front points, prepayment penalties and create value fast.

If you choose to create a web site of your own for use as a free and open communication tool amongst your neighbors, the board cannot prevent that.

We have turned people off from advertising on the radio (even when we could have easily made money off of them creating an ad) because of geographical issues.