Trying to narrow down which strategy will best suit our goals and lifestyle is my current focus, and I am looking forward to having meaningful conversations here on these forums.

It needs to be stopped now before some form of this arises in the so-called metaverse, where tech titans want to shift the entire economy over to so they can extract profits and not be responsible for any of the negative side effects.

Maintenance and potential repairs will also require a long-term financial plan and setting aside a contingency fund for such expenses.The steady cash flow, appreciation over time, and tax benefits can make a meaningful difference to your wealth in the long term, especially with the principal paydown on the mortgage.However, if managing the property from a distance feels too burdensome, or if you’d prefer the certainty and flexibility that comes with having less debt (especially given the high mortgage rates), selling and using the $100,000 in equity to reduce your loan for your next home may be the smarter move.

If you can get considerably better than 3% on a new deal, it may make sense to extract that 200k and move it into a new deal. 

There are too many variables to get any kind of meaningful prediction.

Would be good to clarify this as it would be meaningful if upon sale those gains were taxed as active income.

As @Chris Seveney mentioned there is not really enough equity in house 3 to get a meaningful LOC. even if you were able to leverage enough to pay off House 2 the new rate you would be paying would be higher than the existing mortgage, so you would still be behind overall.Your ROI on those payoffs vs keeping money in index funds is not very good either.Lastly, remember that cash flow from rentals can seem good until it’s not.

People know that what you pay is what you pay is what you get.BTW - one of my lenders looked at 1100 deals since August 17th and did not find a meaningful change in buyer-side commission.

It is perhaps my favorite meetup that is not associated with a larger group (such as SDRE, NSDRE, SDCRE).For the most part the lenders only lend on non owner occupied ADU, at low percentage of ADU addition costs because they know that usually the value extract will be significantly less than the ADU addition costs.  

By the time you have 4, 5 ... 10 properties, it makes it worth the time to systematize and gets some meaningful current income.In short, if I just wanted to invest the money, I'd look into a syndication.