My immediate goal is to acquire our first property and spend the next two years mastering the basics of real estate investment. ( Refining the Go and No property search criteria/ Learning the value of taxes and avoiding them as much as possible/ 1031 exchanges) Depending on my wife’s career orders, we may remain in Baltimore for 1-2 years, but I’m also exploring opportunities in West Texas, Sierra Vista, AZ, and Houston, TX.

It depends on the type of lender, the broker is using.If a broker is using a wholesale lender, they make their money on the back end side.

We see a tightening or restricting of coverage, higher deductibles, more tedious underwriting requirements, and increasing rates.As far as deductibles specifically, it really depends where you are in the country. 

Great idea(s) depending on your market. 

For context, downtown Alexandria performs super well as a rental market and bringing in $5.5k+ as the monthly rental income if you choose to move out of the househack in the future will be absolutely feasible (depending on the property of course).

That depends - if its a short term hard money loan possibly, but expect to pay more for it.I would first ask your current lender if you can extend the loan.

If so thatd be entirely product dependent.

You may decide not to deliver a legal notice right away depending on the violation, but when you know you are dealing with a problem tenant, go straight to the legal notice requirements, and if the tenant still doesn't comply, evict. 

I am also in Cincinnati and I did speak with True Home Ohio (https://truehomeohio.com) and they seemed to be somewhat reasonable except I believe they take a flat fee of $105 per door so depending on how much rent is for that door it could be cheaper or more expensive but their other fees I thought were very reasonable.

Any additional mail costs $.50-$.76 depending on the size... so to prevent you from having hundreds of $.50 charges on your credit card, the default "reload" is $50 (you can set this to whatever you like in the app).Hope this helps....