I bought a 5-unit on a single meter a couple years ago, took a look at the nightmare of ripping open floors and walls to split it up, and simply chose to bump the rent to cover the added water cost.When you run your numbers, make sure you have your plumber share with you where he is going to have to rip open walls/ceilings/floors and add the cost to repair that into your budget to determine the true cost to split them.For future purchases, make sure to include utility costs in your number crunching if they haven't been separated and factor in lazy tenants that don't care what it costs you (remember, you are "rich" because you are a landlord!).

If you plan on doing it sooner, you will need to crunch the numbers on both loans using both your income and liabilities to see if you can support both loans.

So what I am getting at is the answer to your question is half based on psychology and preference (qualitative) and just doing the number crunching analysis (quantitative).                  

Again, I would not factor in any type of appreciation when crunching numbers.

Much more focused on number crunching and finding if a deal makes sense.

My family (dad and sister) did a lot of the legwork while I crunched the numbers from afar.

I have tried to crunch these numbers and I'm getting a negative cash flow on this property.

I've built a basic Excel sheet with some numbers crunching.

The biggest question I have before even crunching the numbers is: what are the code violations?

Got kinda sideswiped by medical things, as well as small domestic issues like babysitting, but in crunch time they can get big kinda fast and hard.