depends of course but I hear people looking for paper losses a lot of times invest in oil and gas - of course the investment is just as important as the paper loss as I know people who invested in MF past few years to get depreciation and losses and then they lost their entire investment and then had uncle sam banging on their door clawing back the depreciation they took as well.So whatever you do make sure you are nont solely investing because you can write it off but it still needs to be a sold investment.

After that, they have been patched on, painted over, glued shut, and oiled infrequently.

If you do not have a property manager who will do it for you and you are going at it alone - I would hire an attorney - more because the amount of time and effort I would need to spend and having no experience at it.Its like changing the oil on your car - yes you can do it but if you have never done it - is it  worth learning or just having an attorney do it and do it right as if you do it wrong and screw it up (especially in massachusetts) - it can cost you time = money.

Think along the lines of an American oil company building a billion dollar drilling operation in an African nation that may not be 100% stable. 

At another property that we had, we were having the furnace replaced going from oil to gas. 

Doing the math, if a seasoned fix and flipper had a well-oiled efficient process and was able to consistently hit $50k per house (after costs and overhead required to go at that pace), he/she would have to do 34 flips in 21 months to make what we made on one deal.

Know one investor who went from notes to commercial office, to crypto and oil and gas.

We had an underground oil tank that we thought was a 270 gallon. 

It's a mindset that beg's the snake-oil-salesman to enter the picture. 

Build - rent - refinance -repeat. in columbus ohio you are buying old houses that are 1900 or 1920 or 1940 and you are in a sellers market. on the other hand you can source land which is a buyers market and build single family homes or duplex or triplexes that will return by renting and pulling cash out on a DSCR loan and doing it again. there aren't a lot of strategies that do this. flipping is different. so many risks. but when someone has a well oiled machine it's all good and less risk.