I have started "driving for dollars" in my spare time to see if I can find off market deals.

If, instead, I kept my current house in my name, and just leased out our spare bedroom as an office to my LLC, I believe I could count a portion of the rental income (75% if I remember correctly) into the DTI equation, thereby helping my DTI for the new property.

Maybe you're being spared the pain of a correction in the future when prices decline to a point that justifie(s)(d) your model, but right here, right now, your modelling is wrong.

In the present credit crunch many of the funds in trouble are the ones who received margin calls when they did not have the spare cash in the account.

He uses mortgage ETFs “sparingly,” mostly in tax-advantaged accounts, and recommends that investors don’t exceed a 3% to 5% allocation to the sector.

My thinking, the tree is on your site, he can't compel you to tear it down, and sounds like SEA is hard to get tree demolition permits anyways (maybe you say "yes" to developer, city says "no").Also, make sure if you do agree to it being taken down, and he pays you for it (he absolutely should pay, more than the 2k mentioned above), that there is a written agreement, that he takes the stump out, or at least grinds it down, backfills and compacts correctly the stump hole, cleans up the area real nice, and re-landscapes that area plus more on your property. 

What i've noticed:The cottages are used sparingly.

I bought a 1963 house on a short sale from the bank and cleaned it up, rehabbed it, and rented it out to a couple in their 50's that were tired of living in an apartment with no garage and no spare room for their grandchildren to visit.

That worked for me up to a point and I got kicked around a little bit in a professional sense - I will spare you the whole life story but the important summary is that it was a process to define myself as an entrepreneur and take the requisite actions to do that successfully. 

I lived in it, rented spare bedrooms out and did that 4 homes in a row.