Gross monthly scheduled rent must be at least twice the P&I payment to break even.Do your due diligence to make sure there's nothing going on with the property that will make expenses (which includes vacancy and capital items) more than 50% of the rent.

The reason is that you are allowed to deduct a lot of items for business purposes that you can't as a person only.

I use what I would consider a Line item to evaluate the deal.I just run every single number into the equation and then I add in overages in rehab expenses, add in additional holding expenses if the property doesn't sell in a reasonable time frame, and I add in a worst case ARV fudge factor.

Adjustments to be made with appraisal comps:http://www.nationalmortgagenews.com/gallery/10-com...Of course, it does not say how to make the adjudtment, but at least it itemizes property differences to be considered. 

In 90% of the cases they accept what the first is offering.Bill is suggesting a POC - you do a POC on the HUd it's just not a line item ON the Hud..it's off to the side, or you can pay the second before closing but that rarely works because you would need a whole separate approval issued or SOMETHING in writing that if you make the payment, they will still close the sale.

But when presented as a reward for a specific act we want to encourage, the tenant is more likely to continue doing whatever you are rewarding her for.Gift cards can be an important tool when training tenants and reinforcing good behavior (e.g. reporting a repair promptly, even when the damaged item does not impact the tenant's comfort).This is certainly not to demean tenants -- after all, everyone's been one at some point -- but we can draw many landlording lessons from the training of dogs.

Just another quick item to take into account: Title insurance.Trust deed lenders or trust deed investors can (and should) follow all the laws they want, but ultimately, it's pretty tough to do too much with real estate that is the collateral for a trust deed investment if you don't have title insurance coverage.

My next step is to create an itemized expenses breakdown instead of the 50-55% defaulthttp://i.imgur.com/aidAJvu.jpg

These items were in the original bid."

I know in my state of Utah I receive approximately a 50% discount on my property taxes on my own personal residence.I've also found in insurance normally to be less expensive on a rental property because it is simply a landlord policy which is less expensive than a homeowners policy since it covers less items.