With inventory slightly decreasing in November, do you anticipate increased competition heading into the new year, or are higher mortgage rates keeping activity balanced?

this is not to suggest that borrowing to invest may not be a good strategy; but one must understand that borrowing INCREASES risk, not decreases risk.2. 

That's a very good point taking the potential further value decrease into consideration (like when running the ARV for pricing it out to the end-buyer), so it makes sense that, like you said, it would have to be a great deal.

I can't remember, but it turned out that since I kept paying my broker 1%+ every time I re-financed my principal never decreased.

My goal is to add verbiage within the lease that will decrease any tiffs between tenants for the common spaces and how to set expectations and promote group effort with cleaning the common areas/shoveling snow/personal dishes/shared fridge/laundry/having guests and so forth. 

Also, I see a lot of rental listings on Zillow that are decreasing their ask price.

If this is how a cash out refinance works, it feels like the strategy is to either have more to rent out within the property (multi-family), wait for average rents in market to increase, rehab the property more and increase rent more, pay off the property/ more of the mortgage and refinance again without a cash out to decrease the mortgage (I don't even know if I can refinance a property twice)? 

When this happens, inflation-adjusted rents tend to decrease.

How do you evaluate the increase (or decrease) in price of the land in question down the road?

To decrease the amount of money you pay out of pocket you could turn part of the home to a STR or MTR.