It really depends on your tolerance for risk and how much liquidity you want to maintain.Researching the Waterbury Market:Waterbury has shown solid potential for multi-family investments.

The last two provide the added benefit of providing you access to liquid cash. 

In our student houses we use a programmable thermostat, but our building monitoring system has its own sensors and can override the wall thermostat and will not allow the temperature to get below 10C (50F) ... we are presently testing a new software load that will also prevent them from cooling the house too far in the summer.

His roadmap for retirement is $500k liquid assets, paid off primary home, and more than 1 income source (real estate, part time job, social security if old enough, etc.).

That's cool.

For example:-A tenant complained about the AC not cooling, so I replaced the entire unit with brand-new equipment.

It seems like I need to check further away from the DMV area.My feelings are if you want “cash flow” you should buy a bond (I really like the tips rate right now) there is next to no reason to buy real estate for cash flow, if you are going to buy you should buy with appreciation in mind, which is not to say that’s the route I’d go, I’ve been liquidating properties to put in stocks and money market funds over the last few years and u just did the math and I’ve come out well ahead, but just to say there are arguments for stocks/bonds, there are arguments for levered appreciation, but the cap rates pretty much anywhere aren’t worth it vs an inflation protected bond, especially since a 3/rd of inflation is real estate anywhere, you could get “cash flow” and inflation protection much easier through a tips.

I will keep you posted on any future developments.”Cool, it’s great that you gave clarity. 

If you have a lot of equity and little cash flow, you may be better off liquidating that asset and reinvesting elsewhere. 

I would build the big house and do a cool deck out towards the creek.