My intention was to highlight that we've been in a prolonged period of very cheap capital and that it is looking more and more probably that going to come to an end and the cost of capital will begin to move back towards historic averages.I do realize that in the U.S.A. residential mortgages are predominately fixed-rate, fixed-term where the term equals the amortization.  

@Mindy Jensenis right, there are good debt and bad debt.The worst case scenario is just you can't rent out the property for a prolonged period and you need the cashflow to support the property.Ask yourself: how likely is that?  

I wonder if at some point the amount can be less due to having "economies of scale" with income from multiple units available to cover catastrophic situations or prolonged vacancies in one or two units.

They should be serviced regularly to prolong life.

The code further defines capital expenditures as an expense to prolong the life of the property among other things which are subject to depreciation.

The big risk is a prolonged vacancy combined with unexpected expenses.  

Especially with the past few years we have experience times of prolonged power outages due to storms.

Well the way involved was just trying to take some action and see if i could get a good discount on a short sale and maybe flip to another investor if the numbers were right......Thanks for the advice i also think the realtor was trying to use me as the middle man to prolong the foreclosure too!!!

Question - how to prolong/extend the escrow until I find the target propert(ies) for my end of the sale? 

And while I personally think prolonged vacancy is unlikely in Massachusetts, this is one reason it is important to keep reserves on hand.Happy to chat further here in the forums or via DM -- but in my opinion there is no such thing as "too much" for a house hack!