@John Matthew Johnston 80% of the time, it's a thankless job:(You're never fast enough for complaining tenants, nor fast enough or cheap enough for owners.To have any chance of success, you have to be extremely organized, or every day starts with your hair on fire!

If you have a nice unit I would try to max it out if possible!

GC walked off the job.

Tenants don't like to be bugged so I always try to be as nice as I can when I help a client sell with a tenant. 

I bought an outdated condo, planning to do a cosmetic rehab later when I had more budget.I moved out of the condo in mid-2024 for a job, and by September, my tenant noticed mice droppings.

I'm noticing there are some really nice cash flow markets in texas, some of which are really close to the Mexican border, though.

Since you're a citizen but you live and work abroad you'd still qualify mostly for second homes occupancy or investor non owner occupancy (primary is hard to claim if your job requires you to be physically next to the office as an example so an underwriter isnt going to readily believe you unless you can get HR to write you a letter to state you're remotely capable of earning this income/job duties anywhere).Hopefully that helps let me know if you have further questions into mortgage planning.

Also, focus on 2 years of job/income stability.Class D Properties:Cashflow vs Appreciation: Typically, all cashflow with little, maybe even negative, relative rent & value appreciationVacancy Est: 20%+ should be used to cover nonpayment, evictions & damages.Tenant Pool: majority will have FICO scores under 560 (almost 30% probability of default), little to no good tradelines, lots of collections & chargeoffs, recent evictions.

I'm wondering if I should build out the house to sold comps valuation (bigger more expensive house chasing equity valuation) ORShould I build just enough of a nice mountain cottage for best cashflow.

Indeed, non-EU purchasers only represent a few percent of the houses bought in the country and the properties they generally buy are not affordable properties so that tax wouldn't solve anything and would bring less capital and less jobs to Spain.