I've got a lovely old 20s-era upstairs/downstairs apartment in a low income neighborhood, and it just breaks my heart every time I evict someone and see how they've trashed the place.

In my opinion, that's EXTREMELY low for the risk involved.

If its not, then I'm sure you could find a hard money lender would would loan you the remaining $40K with a first position lien at the very low LTV.

They dragged things out for months, and their appraisers came back with values that were as low as half of the true value (that was determined by a local licensed appraiser 2 months before).

Interest rates low, unemployment low, inflation down etc.....

I've seen annual RE taxes in Philly as low as $120.

The construction companies are offering deals as low as $100,000 below cost.

So we decided to give this a go with a low cost investment and bought an oceanfront condo/hotel in Myrtle Beach.

I'm sure your friend will give you a pretty low expense number, since that always seems to be the case with this sort of deal (this sort of deal is VERY common, by the way.)

But I do know that if you keep your oldest credit card open to establish a longer credit history, and pay everything on time from now on, and keep your revolving credit line balances low, and don't open a lot of revolving lines of credit, you can have extremely great credit in about 5 to 7 years, higher than 741.