Best of luck on your journey—excited to see you crush it! 

A lot of people tend to mingle these things when they talk about "break even" or "cap rate", but that leads to a lot of confusion.Let's use some real numbers which may be easier to understand. 

We are at the feasibility stage and need help determining the best way forward for the land we have in Maricopa, Arizona.

When you do that, you can get better pricing and leaves less room for error.The best advice is to push forward as quick as possible, fail forward, and always continue to introspect on what you would do differently and then ACTUALLY go back and implement that change (easier to say than do).

The rates are great, but you definitely have to work with someone that knows what they are doing...

Typically, the adjustments I see on appraisals for basements are more flat rate adjustments. 10k is usually the number I've seen.What stinks is that there are a couple of model types that have below grade space where the builder, I'm sure, was trying to lower the taxes by having it below grade so the county wouldn't count that space in the assessment.

Also, you could consider buying something with "hard money"; this comes at a higher interest rate, but you might be able to get into a property and either flip it or refinance it.

Are investors finding it easier or harder to refinance with current rates?

What are the best courses of action here?

Looking for a house we could house hack, had an incredibly low interest rate on mortgage and house has increased in value about 42%, an estimated 180k in equity.