Your goal should be to follow the profit, not search for a notch to your belt.

My thought, or hope, is that if the area is composed of good construction and a good location (by location I mean proximity to down town or some other place people need to be at-not locations as in "this is a nice neighborhood")then property prices will at least keep pace with inflation and probably do better if the area is currently depressed (undervalued).I am not going to wait for the profits from my first house to buy my next house.

The profits have been small really but the homes have also been small ones, a relatively quick turn around and sale.I have 4 rentals as well and I am moving away from that to fix and flip.Send me a personal message if you wish to talk.

Meaning when I go buy a car I don't look at the paint job.A paint job is just small money and some gloss on the tires.I focus on the expensive items like the bones of the vehicle.So with a house I know which items are cheap to fix and which items are expensive and I also know if the repair they are claiming was made when trying to sell to me is correct or it was done improperly and will fail soon and will need to be redone completely.You can try to find another manager but if you have a little house where the manager only make 60 bucks a month etc. there is not much money to be had for the grief involved.I just hope you didn't overpay for this property and expect to try to unrealistically cut repairs to now maintain a profit margin.That won't work and will eventually hurt you upon resale of the property with deferred maintenance.A number one mistake I see is over paying and then grasping at anything to cut costs.

Assuming you decide to keep a property under the option to lease option and hold onto it for whatever reason ( maybe to exercise the option later for a profit on the back end) if the TB doesn't exercise it.2.

One thing weighing on my decision are taxes.If a single-member LLC owns a property, rehabs it, and sells it, are the profits deemed "business income" or "capital gains"?

Bet not.You could possibly rent it out and sell it as a turnkey investment to an unwitting investor from out-of-state, for a large profit.

I think it's very unfair to the seller when the short sale is dropped because there is no profit.

Along the way I learned a heck of a lot about laws, people and opportunities that could be taken advantage for for a nice profit.

pretty small steps...Yeah Don, I've been thinking the same thing, less profit margins but more volume.