Consider long term costs.Central unit(s) belong to you, are maintained by you, and you need to provide power and pay that bill.Window units, even if you provide them, at least place the operation power usage on the tenant.If you clearly note in the rental agreement that "the window units are a gift to the tenant", then maintenance is off-load too.Frequently, the long term costs have a larger impact to your PnL than the cash outlay for the equipment itself.

This may be a long post, but I thought it would be good to walk through everything step-by-step, and explain my thinking along the way.If you want to stick with me through it all, here we go:I was not going to be getting a conventional mortgage for my first property for a number of reasons.First, I am still annoyed at the hoops I had to jump through to get a mortgage for my primary residence.Second, my liquid cash was on the lower end.Third, the properties that I would need to start out with would not be financeable anyway.Fourth, my DTI is on the high side, due to the decision that we made to take out a HELOC to complete interior improvements on my primary house.So, I decided that my path was going to be to form a single member LLC, and take a loan from my 401(k) at work to finance the down payment.Since I do not view the 401(k) loan as a long-term solution, I am treating like hard money, and pay it off ASAP.So, my first deal would be a flip, or a rental that was such a good deal, that I could re-fi out and pull all my cash out.I decided to reach out to the commercial lending department of the local credit union, which I am a member.The person I talked to (who became my lender) is fantastic.I told him what types of properties I was looking for, and that I’d look to turn them into rentals, or to flip them.I will never forget his response, which reminded me why I love this credit union.He said:“Typically, the deals you are talking about are much smaller than the deals we like to do.However, we also realize that you can not get to that level unless someone helps you get there.So, if the numbers make sense, we will see if any of our products fit.”Awesome!

That typically is investors.

His business fors check out on the Nevada Secretary of State website (all businesses operating in Nevada must register) and he appears as the primary on a number of real estate related businesses.References might be as difficult to vet as the lender.Thanks for the help so far . . . 

@Jane Guerreso the credit bureaus will typically not allow individual landlords to report payment data to them without going through an extensive membership process.  

Unfortunately, I just got the building and have not had a chance to get all my policies / procedures / forms /etc. into operation.    

ARV - $660,000Rehab - $135,000 (He really spent $175,000 but that's because it sat longer than expected plus a few hiccups)Purchase - $365,000Based on what I've learned from REIA meet ups and about wholesalers, typically you determine purchase price and wholesale fee using the following formula:(ARV*70%) - Repairs - wholesale fee = Purchase price($660,000*0.7) - $135,000 = $327,000.

If you bring your Operating Agreement stamped by your State Attorney General's office to the bank, they should open an account in the name of your LLC. 

Typically properties I look at cost around $1.2M and need about $150-200k in renos to cash flow.

Again, this is typically initiated with a Pay or Quit notice giving a tenant a certain amount of time to remedy the problem BEFORE the next step which would be filing through the local court system for an eviction.