Obtaining a $200K loan to cover the tax appears to carry a similar risk of a lien, potentially jeopardizing my mortgage approval.What would you advise in this situation?

@Jeremi Ramos do an addendum to your PMA that has all the Portfolios and Buildings on it.Be sure to include language though, that allows you to auto-transfer funds between the Portfolios/LLCs to cover your management expenses.Otherwise an owner could screw you on fees by letting portfolios go negative on their balances.

You can keep all your properties under one roof, so to speak.Cost Considerations: Keep in mind that setting up an LLC comes with some costs, like filing fees and compliance stuff.

Especially if you can get sellers to cover closing costs, a 5% down can be a great option.

Hot water is usually separated it is just the cold water that is often not.For a very large building a flat fee is the move because the back billing and tracking of who paid for what would be hectic, but for a small MF like a duplex it is very easy.I split the bill by the fractional amount of people who live in the unit.In other words, the amount of people that live in the unit divided by the total amount of people living in the builidng.So if there are 3 people upstairs and 2 people downstairs.the upstairs pays 3/5 of the bill, and downstairs pays 2/5.No need to separate anything, you know the tenants will cover 100% of the bill and this approach is fair. 

The fee covers the extra admin cost of filling the vacancy. 

And you know you lose a whole lot of square footage because of the roof angle, right?

Like if we have a $200k refinance we could take that money as income without the tax hit and as long as the debt service is covered by the rental amount we would be covered. 

We have insurance to cover dwelling.

We recommend you get management contracts from several PMCs and compare the services they cover and, more importantly, what they each DO NOT cover.