The rationale being you are reducing your personal housing costs as the rented unit will be covering some of the costs. 

Get the plaster tested for asbestos.If renovations significantly reduce your profit margin, wholesaling the property to a more experienced investor might be more viable. 

When you're ready to purchase a seller concession can be a good way to reduce the cash to close and amount of equity you need to borrow against the primary.

Once you get to around $14k you're going to scale up to $37% but you can deduct half the expenses and depreciation which will reduce your taxable amount of income..again without knowing the income this is not possible to calculate.   

The biggest issue for Baltimore and frankly any rust belt city is the rise of remote work, Baltimore is cheap for a major job center, but it’s not that cheap period, pretty much any area west of Frederick county or east of the bay bridge has ample housing stock for sub 300k and imo a better quality of life, so the one thing that Baltimore has going for it pre-pandemic which was a pretty solid mix of Fortune 500 companies located downtown has been significantly reduced & downtown is a ghostown now.

Alternative income options are available but will reduce the maximum loan to value. 

Can someone review and help us understand if there is something we can skip and reduce the costs.

Definitely seek some expert advice from an accountant or CPA who can advise you on the best ways to reduce the amount of taxes you owe to the IRS

So I started trying to get creative on how to create a win-win-win for all.Here’s how it went down:I got the sellers to agree to an asking price of $180k, a full $40k over what they originally wanted.In the offer, we included a seller credit of $34k.This strategy allowed me to cover the extra commission for both the buying and selling agents and ensure the seller got exactly the cash they wanted should they have sold it at 140k.With the seller credit, this reduced my total out-of-pocket expense to just $6k.I used a commercial DSCR loan product with a local bank.

It is true that you have to honor the lease, but in my case, the risk was reduced because it was tenant at will.