I was just talking on our podcast about this with Anthony Vicino, our tenants are our customers and too many landlords ignore customer satisfaction just because everyone NEEDS housing of some sort.

The business of being a landlord is about providing great customer service.

Where is the highest paying customer?

The challenge arises as the city permits only true divided lite windows, leading to a cost of $40k for 4 custom-built wood arch windows to replace rotted ones facing the street.

I don't think your plans will ever be built my someone else to be honest if they were custom. 

This is much harder than painting a car , ( I use to do do some custom paint jobs in the 80's) .   

Have good written agreements with your customers.

We've a track record to share and a story to tell as we market our "new" resort to a large & generally untapped upscale customer base throughout Texas as well as both nationwide and internationally.

Little bit of a learning curve because you can customize reports and analysis based on your own equations but once its setup, its very effective and works great.James Storey, CCIM 

@Ardian SelimiYou said Alaska high cost of labor makes it hard to pencil out on existing homes but I think that would apply to the new builds also.For personal residences, I have rehabbed a house hack and buy two homes and the builds came out unpredictable even though the first home’s national production builder and the second home’s local custom builder both had plenty of experience with cost and labor estimates.For my RE investments, I went with where I could have a a good chance with building a team/knowledge/mentoring/experience.I grew up in a house hack, started with a house hack and then started with student rentals and then out of state airbnbs.