The agents I've used all moved to other locations with higher prices, but my main lender these days is American Federal Mortgage.

As we all know we live in this society where debt is encouraged and rewarded than people paying down things all at once.

Maybe you can STR to American tourists?

@Josh Rodriguez Here are some resources to help you analyze different markets: Census Bureau: American Community Survey (ACS)  The ACS was launched in 2005 and is administered every year by the Census Bureau to roughly three and a half million households in the USA.

I should add, for any American readers that properties meeting the 1% rule in my area are extremely rare.My question is what can I do, in terms of refinancing or otherwise to decrease my monthly mortgage payments to a level where I can gain a cashflow on this property?

@Jude MunalemYour local law society will have a standard offer to purchase you should be able to get a copy through your attorney that you can use.

You are lucky you live in Hong Kong.....go to ETrade, Schwab, Citibank, HSBC or one of the American banks there and open account...then they should be able to USD account either there or in US branch.An alternative is someone like Cathay Bank in USA. 

Stefan, I used American Internet Mortgage aimloan.com to Refi two house I have in Bryan TX last year.

If you are looking for a general cap rate for different classes within a market you can search for CBRE's North American Cap Rate Survey, but you will need to drill down to the submarket, to get the market sentiment for the area you are looking in.

Some examples of potential future drivers will be: something similar to what Bush did when he signed the American Dream Downpayment Act of 2003, China easing up on Capital Controls (this would be a great sign, but with trade war and China's issues with their own economy I seriously doubt this), IPOs over last 2 years creating much needed wealth for employees (takes 12-24 months for them to be able to exercise stock options), a dot com like bubble in the stock market (I think this is most likely scenario given stock buybacks and QE and I won't be surprised to see stocks doing something absolutely unbelievable over the next 1-5 years similar to 97-end of dot com bubble), or heavy doses of QE and easier access to credit for most people.Working in the Bay Area, we saw first hand how many buyers were foreign and how many paid for houses in cash without even looking at the homes in quite a few cases.