. - Rates go down, you refinance and harvest the cashflow improvement.

I'm paying 125,000 for it, plus renovations, which all get rolled into escrow.My goal is to keep the house, but harvest the equity in a few years to spring into rental properties.

Good luck...Yeah - I 100% agree with you ... this was just harvesting some material before the backhoe comes in and knocks the thing down.  :-)  Unfortunately no cool moulding or door knobs or anything of much interest... just the original fir floorboards (*beautiful* tight grain) we'll do something neat with.Been working on this project for 20 months or so - it's an urban subdivision and new home construction.  

The basic data points as I think of them:---What is your gross rental income per booking---What is your cost per welcome basket---What is the increase in chance of a repeat booking, based on the presence of the welcome basket---Secondarily, what is the change in likelihood of a great review, based on presence of welcome basket     If you have a high gross rental income per booking (say average $5k per booking), and you can offer an incredibly high impact welcome basket at a low cost (say the basket costs $20 but includes dates harvested from the date palm trees located on the property), you will likely find this yields huge returns in repeat bookings and reviews.    

Nonetheless it's an extremely new area and I'm curious as to if I should make the jump here or raise my price limit and look into other well-established areas with solidified school systems such as Pearland, Katy, the newer areas of Richmond (Long Meadow, Harvest Green...).

Spend every cent you can spare on things that will get you quality leads.Grow your buyers list.Get a websiteplace craigslist ads to harvest cash buyers,Write good conversion oriented content on your site.

It's like with the seasons: There's a time for preparing the field, a time for sewing the seeds, a time for growth, then harvest, celebration, reflection, and rejuvenation.The challenge for many of us is accepting it is so.

The IRS essentially has a lien on my entire harvest in the future.  

The investment plan calls out for land entitlement, whereby the investor doesn't actually own a couple of acres of the land but is entitled to the proceeds from harvesting what is on his entitled area of the land.    

Of course traders are comfortable trading it up since then - they know no one's going to do anything about increasing domestic supply.If people aren't allowed to harvest energy supply, of course rising demand will cause rising prices.