You don't have to deal with a basement with 4 feet of water with water tanks floating around in one of your apartment buildings while you are in Iceland (ask me how I know!)

If the value of the house is 150K or so, you should have enough cash to acquire the property and float the renovations until the lender gives you a draw.Then, once the property is stabilized and at least 6 months have passed, refinance into a DSCR loan. 

The floating shelves in the kitchen don't hurt people. 

One way to measure the future is take a look at syndicator portfolio holding and check the financing type of each property, if they choose the majority of the portfolio into floating rate and the baloon payment is this year or next year, they are definetely going to experience "crash" time.Most syndicator is just buying times these days, hoping the rate would be normalized in after 2025.Invest in equity investment could be silly except if they could come up with 50% cash.In high rate environment, you may want to invest in debt investment and you act as the bank.In low rate environment, you may want to invest in equity investment with leverage.

Being that my heloc (where I git the cash fir purchase and rehab) is still hanging in at around 4%, my safety net is to just get the duplex rented after rehab is done (roughly 3 months after purchase) and float it to the 6-month mark and then cash out refinance based on the ARV LTV, which I am confident will get me most, if not all, costs back.

I also do a lot of floating between long term care facilities to keep busy.

I was at a family get together over christmas and a number of aunts/uncles/cousins were floating around the idea of buying a family ranch and I am now wondering how financing for properties like this work.

You can buy Bromine Tablets and a Floating Tablet Dispenser at any local pool/spa supply shop. 

Needless to say I won't be using that roofing company again due to the "change order"So $47k was the total initial cash outlay of downpayment ($15,500), closing costs ($5,500), repairs ($12,150), personal "float" to cover mortgage / lienable utilities while tenants were placed factoring in that 1st month's rent to PM for leasing ($2184), a fridge replacement for one unit, carpet cleaning for the other unit, and rekeying for all locks.But yes there are various places that we could have optimized, I wish I could have avoided these problems before they happened, but sometimes you have to get burned to know how to properly handle a fire going forward.

If you are in CA where the assessed values are reset by the purchase price, I believe you just use the tax rate since their tax rates float unlike the ad valorem system.You are also asking about the tax rate.