You may need some help with capital, or credit, or both.

So I have my house that refinanced in 2020 for a 15yr 2.5% rate and we have about 56k equity.

Conventional loan, 25% down at ~7% interest rate How did you add value to the deal?

Many claim they do not charge a markup, but then aren't transparent with invoices, etc. 1) If a PMC charges $x hourly, their markup is built into that hourly rate as they are NOT paying their workers that hourly rate.2) Many PMC's send you ONLY their invoice, or from their wholly owned maintenance company, not the underlying invoices from Home Depot and contractors.

Some lenders offer discounts to return borrowers so maybe look into both flip and DSCR rates when finding a lender. 

If you're goal is a long term hold, you're almost certainly going to do well even with a market rate deal in any of those states.

.* Receipts and Expenses: Once I brought to Jenny's attention that we were 20k above budget, she refused for days to give me the receipts, saying that I needed to give her my credit card statement first.

If I have several options, I would prefer a HELOC with no initial draw requirements (i.e. to establish a literal line of credit that I have no specific short term plans to use), i.e. not something like the better.com HELOC. 

There’s a lot of construction, which could hurt both prices and vacancy rates.

We had been in a fast appreciation and low interest rate market for years.