You could have her "quit claim" it over to you but that isn't a clean way to do it.

Matt, thanks, but you don't quite understand Baltimore.

Despite the fact that I only owned an 8 unit building (purchased last year) and had never used Agency financing, it took us just over three months from application to close.It was quite an experience but I had good assistance from the folks at Red Capital on the Freddie financing - they walked me through a lot of the process and gave me a good idea of what I needed to do. 

I don't think this investment is quite as safe as you think it is.

Question is should I be content with these 2 places making us money (next year i estimate 50k profit) when I’d need probably 4x that to quit my job?

Some local municipality can also be quite expensive, but you would need to look this up.

I know the development fees are significantly higher to do it this way, but it would definitely increase the property value quite a bit over the long haul.

It's those maniacs that buy homes cash via quit claim deed off of craigslist that really get screwed.Make sure your property manager is a licensed real estate brokerage.Understand you can not eliminate all risk, only mitigate it.

They must be using averages or something to inflate the numbers, because you can definitely make less than the stated income (by quite a bit) and afford rent in the various states that I am familiar with.

Labor, as you know, and materials are going up in price by quite a bit.