From a business perspective, if we were to offer incentives for renewal, that would mea n we’d have to increase the rental amount by even more to recuperate that lost income.

Did you somehow recuperate your money? 

Bank short sales are the banks way of recuperating as much as possible and minimizing losses.

I recuperated some very interesting ceiling lamps from the 80's on this rehab.

In Cancun recuperating from 3 hours at the dentist!

The Refinance step where you can recuperate the dollars you spent purchasing the property!

I need my husband to come home, recuperate from unrewarding employment, we need to be able to support our kids and ourselves and my dad (somewhat, he's got some pension), and we need to be smart and prepared.My sense tells me that my area is not necessarily a great place to start, so I'm looking at markets outside CA, but I'm going to use my town as a case study so I can become familiar with all the macro/micro analyses and learn how to communicate with the professionals in this area. 

I always tell my clients there is no one size fits all with mortgage, and it's very true. one person i explain points and rate-buy-down to, they say "you'd have to be nuts to do that" and another client would say "buy it down as far as i can go, don't care how much it costs". what i recommend is doing the math on the recuperation period. so in your example, if the cost is $6500 to save $400 per month, how long would it take you to recuperate the $6500 in added cost?

I have since reinvested the equity I was able to take out and recuperate from this negative asset into "proper" cash flowing property in other states.  

Would fix up and sell it himself, but then would be knocked with capital gains taxes and recuperation taxes from depreciation over the years- doesn't have much time or desire to rehab the property himself right nowHere's the potential plan forward: - the tenant is given some amount of time to move out. - my friend pays off the remaining mortgage note of $45k- my friend deeds me the property - my friend pays for all rehab- my job is to do all the work (I'm handy) and handle logistics of rehab if a contractor is needed. - once I finish rehab, I'll put a renter in for $900 (or raise to market rent at this time.