Use the 50% rule, which is a more realistic estimate of expenses, and try for positive cash flow after allocating 50% of rent for expenses.

Such a release fee is necessary otherwise you may be required to pay more than is allocated to release a property.

Commissions resources and their investigators work on a very limited budget and only want to allocate time to the most serious cases.It's kind of like with police in that if you call saying the neighbors dog's is barking too much versus them getting a robbery call they could care less about the dog call.Sellers use brokers and agents to weed through buyers to find the ones the seller is searching for.

Waiting to the cap expense is needed rather than allocating each month will make for some big surprises.Good luck

If you've lived there for at least 2 out of the last 5 years, you can exclude $250k ($500k if you're married) of gains from your taxable income.If it was ever a rental property, there may be some allocations/limitations but, if not, you'd get the full exclusion.The difficulty in getting loans depends on a number of factors like the lenders you're speaking to, credit score, DTI ratio, etc.

You can freely allocate costs to either party.

In a way, if done right risk allocation / apportioning should be close to a zero sum game .  

As I only have around 30k allocated to the investment 125k buying power would not be enough for a 3-4 unit.

That's actually what I do: the majority of my real estate portfolio is in direct real estate that I own, then the second highest allocation is in syndications/crowdfunding debt.

., if you have both options (yes, that might be a relevant "if"), then the neatest loan should be a straight Refi, because your resulting cash flow is contained within one neat package of: income minus expenses, for that property.Whereas, LOCs may end up being allocated to random deals here and there, and it might become less easy to know exactly how much each property is really costing you / earning you, so you may end up averaging your income and expenses between all your deals.