Artificial indeed. 

Medicine cabinets, building materials. 

The tenant claimed allergy problems, but frankly it's like saying I should pay for all tenants' allergy medicine if there is a bunch of flowers next door to the building.

.- Rent control in many cities is another rule keeping rents artificially low.

Risky but I am ok with it.My one question is when it comes to doing the cash out refinance at about 6 months, I will have a lot of my credit cards and my debt to income ratio will be artificially skewed because of the rehab costs on the cards (but no different than if I had a different lending source....hard money, commercial loan).

Job insecure, food, medicine, transportation insecure ~ and the first thing they need to give up is rent in times of crisis.  

@Brent Coombs and @Mindy Jensen My priorities are certainly heavily weighted toward studying for medicine and becoming an excellent physician.

Thay can cry all they want, but we don't artificially inflate value.

Last i checked, UncleSam does not permit persons/artificial entities to skip yearly tax returns - unless they made so little in the past year (or past 2 consecutive years) that they did not even report/pay.. in which case if there isn't even income in the past 12-24mos a lender would then look at assets/collateral if there are any, as a potential security in event of default, but would charge higher interest if there is no annually documented income but only assets/collater.

Further artificially low interest rates are propping up cash flow in a way that is unsustainable.