Hi guys, I am new to this forum.

At this point I can't fathom spending close to $100k in repairs and potentially being right back where I started.

Depending on your flavor, this could be good or bad.Connect with a great property manager early on, as many won't work just any property in any part of the City.Being an east coast city, our housing stock is fairly old and unless it's been properly rehabbed, will have typical "old house" maintenance.None of this is meant to discourage you from investing in multi units in Baltimore, but I'd try to set realistic expectations about the market here.TLDR; we have a wide variety of "multi-unit" structures in Baltimore.

This is the type of transaction I am referring.

This is a bad practice for STRs and even worse for MTRs.

This house-hack will be a negative cash flow while I live in it, fix it up, etc. 

This is how you accomplish this: You can change the opt-out language in hopes that your sellers will not respond with words that do not trigger automatic opt-outs.

This is the same sort of criteria a lender uses to qualify people for mortgages.

At this point I'm realizing can scale a lot faster with those partnerships, and beginning to try and understand the actual structure of the business behind these kinds of partnerships.

Neighborhood Scout is not going to cover any shortfall you have if it doesn't materialize.you could try finding a bank or broker that will do 80% out on a refi, although probably not possible to close by the end of this month.