Quote from @James Heller: Hey everyone -- I have a ~1000 sqft townhouse (on 2 levels) here in San Diego, and I'm looking to do some updates and modernize the place.

This trabct has a farmhouse 3 bed 2 bath, 4 car garage, and two barns.

They even have a value add less than performing a garage conversion.  

The house was a 3/2, 1650 sqft, with 2 car garage.

While rates were near all time lows, we bought a home that we could reside in and rent out the backyard detached living garage space.

Other small things I do besides leasing, mangement, some maintenance, are installing keypads to doors, programming gate remotes, garage remotes, doing walk throughs, doing walk through videos (15-20 mins move in/move out videos), advertising videos, take care of our website, our portal, fix the gates and cameras when they go out, just like everything you can think of.   

We gutted the interior down to the cinder blocks, re-designed the unit layout to fit a more modern lifestyle.

Quote from @Michael Daley: This is why I'm thinking more about taking the STR route until I can refi with a better interest rate. 2 units (2/1) in a good area at $1.3 with some ability to update and has a garage or ADU capability would work if we can get $5000 per month for each unit.$10k STR rent on $1.3m property at 80% LTV  will be negative cash flow when properly allocating for all the expenses.  

550k roughly-Or new duplexes with 4 bedroom units and a garage?

It's user friendly, with a modern design.