After nearly 3 years of operating history, I'm concerned that the properties are not performing well enough to warrant continuation of the venture, and I'm considering selling.

In the meantime, maybe look into refinancing options for the short-term rentals to access some equity, especially if they’re performing well.

Here's a bit of background:I have over ten years of experience in real estate.I've bought and sold hundreds of properties in the past two years.I have six performing rental properties and aim to expand this to 50 by the end of the year.

While you shouldn’t categorize all tenants and it’s the landlords responsibility to properly screen, the tenants who reside in better situated housing and pay higher rents are more financially responsible meaning lower rate of rent loss and will generally take better care of the property which combined will result in less time allocated towards management functions if self-performed or more favorable management fee structures if 3rd party management companies are utilized (which ties back to #1, as well).

Location analysis is crucial, considering demographics, retail market performance, and traffic counts.

For context, 4 adults and all our tech living here, we were running about $250/mo on average per month for electricity anyway... outside of summer a/c useage. so all in all, its saved me about $2k a year if i had to guesstimate for you (it stays hot here through October usually).i still owe about $23k on mine, have no intentions of selling the house. but if i decide to move out and rent the whole house out, our market would support higher rent in exchange for no electricity bill. i think you just need to decide what YOUR main benefit of having the panels are. for me it was for the house-hack, and consistent billing, despite the usage. if its strictly for property value increase, i'm not sure it would be worth it, pending your specific market. 

It is my understanding that the company works out the tenant billing rates based on your master utility bill to keep it consistent and fair.So, the technology exists BUT is it legal in Maine to bill the tenants in this way?

For DSCR, it's usually slightly higher than the conventional route due to it only looks how well the subject property rental performs + credit vs conventional where it requires credit, income, assets to be reviewed.

Perform a Break-Even Analysis: Determine how long it will take for the savings from the refinance to cover the prepayment penalty and any other refinancing costs.

So we shopped it out to our consistent buyers but at a strong price of $75k.