Will keep ya'll posted.Question:  If I want to buy a second home as an investment property before 12 mos, do my mortgage rates fluctuate ?  

Additionally, the HELOC will be prime plus, so your rates could fluctuate.

Hey Jorge,Great to hear that you are jumping into the game and sounds like you have a good property to start.So the money out of pocket is going to fluctuate quite a bit based on the lender, but no matter what in the HML space, most groups are at the very least credit 'informed', meaning that they would at least do a 'soft' inquiry and a back ground check to decide the terms and the risk of the investment from their perspective.Of the lenders that I work with, there are a few that do no asset seasoning, and that is something that it feels would be VERY important to clarify on the front end of any deal you do.

A good rule of thumb I use on multi-family/commercial is to request 3 years of Income and Expense statements so that you see how much the utilities can fluctuate throughout the year. 

I think you can have both scale and diversity in portions which achieve your overall goals.If you are a remote investor, and using property management, there will be a threshold of scale - number of units you hold in a single market - which will garner you a better rate/unit for property management costs.On the macro-economic level, distribution of holdings in different regions (states/provinces, countries) with diverse economic drivers and a low-level of coupling will help smooth the bumps of fluctuation in local economies.So perhaps it is not a question of Dallas or Indianapolis, but one of how much Dallas and Indianapolis and do your acquire them in parallel or sequentially.

It's in NW Florida, and near the water the temperatures don't fluctuate as much as they do inland.

I was also held up with the contractors bids not matching and contingency percentages fluctuating. 

Sometimes there are fluctuations in spending, so I take an entire year and average it out.  

Although I have calculated it into my numbers, I get extra conservative because of the fluctuation of cost.

I stopped once I realized I could protect my principal from market fluctuation and get twice the income from my savings.