Utah is a hotter market so use the equity to buy.

I don’t think anyone will leave a bad review because they didn’t know you had a structural beam/pole in your house prior to arriving.

There will also be some houses that pop up as "pending" on zillow for around 60% of the ARV, but the house is already pending before it's listed (it arrives on the site as "pending".

But over 95% of the stays there were no problems, and I'm blessed that my LTR tenant has great pride of ownership in our property so he looks out for the property and has even offered to help maintain  parts of the outside of the duplex to ensure my STR guests always have a great overall impression of the property upon arrival.

The hard part is how to arrive at the numbers.

It's also important to make sure your rental income expectations are reasonable, but it's hard for anyone else to second-guess you on that without more background on how you arrived at your rental income number.

but in hotter markets I can see where this could be a stumbling block.. 

The fact that you are considering them so thoroughly in your thought process tells me that you have no reason to second guess whatever decision you arrive at. 

I wonder if maybe I'll have better luck once Spring arrives. 

So, you Google stuff to learn more about having and rearing kids and that just makes things worse 😬😬😬While you are trying to "get ready" the baby arrives and guess what you realize it wasn't as bad as you thought.