So I have my house that refinanced in 2020 for a 15yr 2.5% rate and we have about 56k equity.

Once the home is a rental, you can deduct operating expenses like property taxes, mortgage interest, insurance, and depreciation (over 27.5 years for long-term rentals).

But I did not like what I saw, anything under what Costar would rate 4 stars did not appeal to me. 

@Zach Howard there is no agreed upon Classification in the 1-4 unit market.We've done our best to logically create a system for our market, mostly based upon relative sale prices, but also using crime rates, rents, occupant income and a few other variables. 

Quote from @Dinesh Nair: I am a Canadian investor with a US corporate entity- we closed on our first property and now working to find financing through a lender… however rates keep changing all the time.. is there a site to track rates ? 

If the market rents do not cover the mortgage, you may do a no ratio DSCR for a higher rate/reduced LTV  Which most likely the 1007 will be nowhere near the revenue generated by a PadSplit operation.

Rather than paying for childcare services from a large organization, we found that it was significantly cheaper to pay for a second mortgage than to pay for childcare.

I welcome and encourage anyone on the forum to chime in if I may have misrepresented anything, but this has been my mental model after spending countless hours running through different scenarios.I dont have a heloc personally but just curious are they all fixed rate / or are some of them variable when rates rise the interest rate rises or when rates fall the interest rates fall.   

If rates come down (most likely not in 2025) you can refinance or just shovel cash-flow and pay it down quicker. 

A great lake front home doesn't have to cost a mint but it sounds like you want something that is really fantastic which will bring a higher nightly rate.