I'll get to that shortly, but once renovated:2 studios @ $425 p/m = $850 (but just call it $425, because I'll live in one of these).Asking price: $79,900What I want to offer and how I want to propose it:Offer: 70k, 3k earnest money, seller carries 12k for 3 year term at 3%.Renovation (this is fairly crude until I walk through with a good friend of mine who has been at this a while): 40k - I would also hope to save on some of this by doing much of that myself.

I'll get to that shortly, but once renovated:2 studios @ $425 p/m = $850 (but just call it $425, because I'll live in one of these).Asking price: $79,900What I want to offer and how I want to propose it:Offer: 70k, 3k earnest money, seller carries 12k for 3 year term at 3%.Renovation (this is fairly crude until I walk through with a good friend of mine who has been at this a while): 40k - I would also hope to save on some of this by doing much of that myself.

The prohibited transactions are a fairly complicated topic.  

We are fairly new to the area, but my wife is a great real estate agent, so we were able to negotiate a pretty decent deal for what we believe is a value added home.  

Hi Nick,I'm fairly new here and your posting is very interesting to me.

I am flexible and willing to do what is fair and common practice.

Cody has some really good tips, however the strategies he mentioned are fairly common and might not work as well in our market.

Once I've gotten a fair amount and I have some income coming in every month I wanted to go bigger and invest that into apartments.

But since you asked, I do have some fairly strong ones.

Keep in mind that many companies have salespersons to do their estimates (and @Nicole W. and @Russell Naylor) and may not ever step foot on the roof (if only for insurance reasons).Unless there is something pretty unique, estimating roof work is fairly simple.