If the tenant was there for 4 years with no qualms you have made your money back and then some. 

If you find something that works well as a short-term rental, but doesn't work well for you as a home, you'll have money but be dissatisfied when you live there.You don't even need it to produce a profit.

It's a great way to increase your net worth and these loans can also be used to pull cash out of a property as it appreciates allowing you to reinvest money into new deals.Happy to connect to discuss further. 

(cost of buy-down in dollars / monthly savings vs the free loan = # of months it would take to recoup the money spent). will you keep the LOAN at least that long?

Never built in Houston before so take my feedback with a grain of salt but I'd put money on it being impossible to build a duplex from scratch for $125 a foot (including everything from drawings, engineering, permit fees, general conditions, labor, material, landscaping).Out here in AZ the builder cost is going to be $200 a foot at best, but add 20% on top of that for the client cost.

You can most certainly make more money with higher occupancy in your short-term rental.2.

So your super basic P&L may look like: $30,000 Rents-$3,000 insurance expense -$9,000 interest-$3,000 taxes-$8,000 operating expenses-$14,000 depreciation ----------------$7,000 loss on paper for the year  so negative taxable income But remember- $14k of that (depreciation) was something we didn't actually spend money on- so cash in bank at year end would be $7,000. 

Again, I used my parents but this time only as lenders of part of the money for the down payment.

We put back most of the money back into our business, as the cost of living for me is covered by the student rentals.

If not I wouldn't bother selling as there is an incredible amount of money lost in buying and selling properties, so you have to make sure you have a plan to maximize the equity and actually have enough.