I do my best to put my many value judgments out of sight when I deal with my tenants.

You should also have roughly a 10-20% buffer saved up above your rehab budget for unforeseen repairs that might need to be taken care of or for emergencies like a pipe bursting or a break-in.Investing in real estate should be with your "play" money when you're just starting out, you don't want to be putting your entire savings into your first deal and have it go sideways and lose everything you've saved up.

Thoughts on how Prop 10 will play out?

Then you will have to go to the property and review the footage if you suspect there was a problem.The great thing about having an internet connection is you can get real time motion alerts and you can log into your camera feed and see if someone was breaking into your place and call the police to catch them instead of handing them a video after the fact and hope they can find them.Either way I use a more robust system than the plug in play wifi cameras that are sold at Sam's or Walmart.I use  Digital Watchdog software running on a laptop and DW cameras.

What you can also do is play offense on your property. 

Going that route gets her the best of both worlds - she'll end up with tax free money from the sale, and capturing appreciation both on that place and the new place.If she's already lived in it long enough then other considerations would come into play. 

So you combine that with minimal to negative cash flow, and suddenly California really becomes an appreciation play (in my opinion). 

I deal in nonperforming firsts, actively in my business, passively in my IRA.

Transitioning into our real estate biz, along with supplementation from investment properties would be ideal by the timeframe given would be ideal, but might be too aggressive.

so square footage could potentially be an issue at play.