Appreciation for a property is an unknown and may only be realized when a property is refinanced or sold.

There are simply too many unknowns for anyone to answer many of your questions intelligently.  

It's worth going to the seminar to try and pickup on the free information however it's ultimately a high pressure sales scheme where you will be forced to make a choice to invest a large sum of money with a lot of unknowns.

That response tells me they are either 1.)unfamiliar with HUD bidding/purchases and are therefore ignorant and intimidated by the unknown, or 2.) trying to get you to pay as much as possible.

The reluctance to sell my current home is due to the unknown amount of time that short sales can take (i.e.

Just looking for suggestions on whether it is better to keep the rent low, with reliable easy tenants in place, or raise the rent and risk losing those tenants for an unknown future tenants.

The reward is so incredible versus the little fear of unknown.  

There are to many unknown that you can not get answered quick enough.

I've always known that a PCS was coming but the exact dates were unknown until about two weeks from when I would have to vacate the property in order to have time to move, drive, find a place to live, etc.

If the numbers are right and there are other items in the "plus" column it could be worth hanging on.There's really too many unknown variables here to give you a meaningful opinion from here, like: prices, rents, amount of cashflow and equity, your longterm plan...