With that said, I am sure that there are many people making money in real estate in the tri-city area, and if you are living there anyway, you can certainly house-hack and decrease your cost of living while simultaneously growing equity in properties.

With a heloc your payment will decrease as you start paying down the balance but if you do a cash out refi you are stuck with you much higher rate for a while. 

Refinanced into Conventional pre-Covid to take advantage of no PMI and huge decrease in interest rate.

It's going to increase the number of arbitrage units, which I think decreases the quality of the product.

There are infill projects where this does happen, that would be an exception.You would also have to account for time, it can be slow to get permits (if even allowed) and then you'd still have build time.You would be better off making agressive offers on the property that would account for the potential decrease in value.

This should reduce future flood insurance rates, increase the marketability of the home as well as decrease the chance of having to go through this in the future.

You need money if you are going to buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat.If you have no money right now I recommend looking for ways to increase your income, decrease your expenses, and save.Research wholesaling as an option to build up some capital.

However, even with this decrease in rates, homebuyer demand continues to weaken.After three weeks of increased homebuyer activity, demand for mortgages pulled back 1.9% last week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s latest survey of applications, with purchase activity down 3% from a week ago.Sure the rates have come down, but they are still double what they were at the start of the year.I am curious to see what the data will show following the CPI print coming out next week and the FED meeting the following day. 

I would not do anything that decreases storage for a rental.   

I know it's good to be conservative but for these reasons, I'm thinking that my capex allowance could potentially be decreased from 10% to perhaps 5%.Would be very interested in what people think about this as I am hesitant in lowering my allowance for capex.Cheers,Liam