Compare this to your total monthly costs, including mortgage, insurance, taxes, vacancy and maintenance.

When including maintenance/cap ex, vacancy, pm, misc he will have little, and possibly negative, cash flow.if he invested almost $250k to add less than $150k of value (assume some of the current value came from the home appreciation), there is no cash flow until the initial negative equity position is recovered.  

Until 2018, when it was closed due to low revenue and high maintenance costs 2.

When you do things the right away all the time, you can't be pressured by a high maintenance tenant.

I am NET cash flowing just over 1k (includes maintenance, repairs, cap-ex, vacancies, utilities), which is pretty good considering this is in SoCal.

On paper some of these buildings had amazing metrics, excellent cash on cash returns, cap rates, etc, but when I looked at the buildings I found the neighborhoods were rough, there was poor management in place, there was lots of deferred maintenance to address.

I read that as meaning that a $100,000 property can have $15,000 of deferred maintenance as long as its not immediate roof work, outdated wiring, mold or water issues.  

Her unit needs to be improved or I fear that the costs to fis it up will grow without decent maintenance.

Not big enough for full time maintenance, so how do you staff that? 

Do you upcharge on maintenance?