The additions they put in to make extra bedrooms take away the standard livable areas you would find in a typical SFR.

The West and South posted more modest gains of 6.9% and 0.5%.

I’m planning to start by buying in Buffalo to gain experience and learn the ropes.

I am grateful that you shared this, because I do think a lot of these gurus, while generally having good intentions, are typically very naive and lack experience to truly teach anything.  

Typically corporate/bank owned homes are managed by an asset management company.

Selling gets a tax free gain and allows you to be more liquid; keeping it allows you to have once in a lifetime cheap debt and have that leverage on an appreciating asset. 

But thats part of the being OOS and as I gain more experience and I better team I can minimize that.

Is it better to sell, pay off mortgage and capital gains and take the cash to invest in another property or is it better to refi/ETO and take the cash to invest in another property?

Yes there are broker's out there that also don't do good business, but they typically work with clients that do not know any better. 

Quote from @Devin James: In one of our development projects, the City staff asked us to remove 40 units from our concept plan.This wasn’t requested by the City Commission at a formal hearing, it was the opinion of the staff.Our original concept already proposed fewer units than the current zoning would have allowed.Here’s what erasing 40 units means:- 40 fewer homes for buyers- Over $1M in lost profit for our team- Fewer tax dollars and impact fees that could’ve benefited the City’s infrastructure & servicesWe gotta get betterEveryone wants more affordable housing, but not everyone wants to do what it takes to achieve it we never listen to the recommending bodies. we move for city approvals and work closely. the other thing we do is keep going back to the same groups over and over and over and over every month on the same agenda and make very small reductions like 2% or 4% and that reduces and beats them down eventually they accept what you want. it's just before beating a dead horse. we keep tabling until they give us something we all agree on then we go to vote. in our city in columbus we have to get recommendations but that's our strategy. we used to come out as aggressive as possible. we typically study developments in the area and keep it very similar in terms of density. we have a track record of very controversial projects and litigation and not taking no as an answer. after a year of that haha I can tell you it's not worth it. now we are more relationship based and buying the right kinds of plots of land. if the numbers don't work on the front end don't do the development.