With moderate increases this year, we’ll be at a positive cash flow of over $2,000/month ([$3,500 income - $1,500 mortgage] - Taking into account Cap-X, vacancy, etc. and cash flow is still over $1,500 which meets our goal of $500/door).Fitting that its in the "Milk District", because its certainly a cash cow for us!

In more moderate to lower income areas people tend to live more hand to mouth so when economy starts going down it can become a big domino effect.

So far I've complete a medium level rehab on a dilapidated property (Middletown) that's been in my family since the 1950s/1960s  which is currently a rental property I manage for my mother, done a moderate amount of repairs on her house (Middletown), and purchased my own fixer upper (4 unit house-hack in Caldwell) where I've done a full rehab on one unit and medium to light work on the other units.

Although I'm not promoting myself as an educator and do not provide any formal curriculum or program, I do foster a "learn by doing" experience from the nature of the JV relationshipI hope this helps to answer your question about the motivation from the experienced investor side.Bob***Moderator note that this reply is to respond to the poster's question and not intended to be a promotion of any of kind***

I've got a moderate but mostly cosmetic rehab on a single family home coming up.  

If you are looking for a place to invest disposable income and get a moderate return higher than that of the stock market the answer is probably yes.

Here are some that I've visited and found very useful:https://www.meetup.com/Addicted-to-ROIhttps://www.meetup.com/RealEstateAtWorkhttps://www.meetup.com/Fixated-On-Real-Estate(it doesn't mean that everything else is worthless, only means that I didn't visit all of them ;)Also I found that some actively moderated Facebook groups are also very useful, in particular would recommend WAREI group:https://www.facebook.com/groups/WAREI

I am leaning towards increasing the rent to $1200-$1250 instead of the more moderate $1125-$1150.

Yes some of it is their properties have gone up in price to equity, some of it is they have paid some things down, and some of it looks like retirement planning as older more experienced investors move towards retirement and seem to value cash flow over numbers of doors.We personally like moderate leverage, but we are starting to think in terms of slightly fewer doors that are paid off in 15 years vs having as many totally leveraged properties as possible.

However, in most circumstances you would want to have at least 91-95%+ PO at all times unless you are performing some moderate-to-heavy interior renovations.