At that point for many panic sets in and they buy a piece of crap to avoid tax penalties.

Secondly, they do the apprasial to avoid any mistakes or bullsh!

Unless you plan to move out of the area you could use your equity as a downpayment on a rental property, and you would avoid incurring capital gains.

If I can avoid using expensive hard money lenders as much as possible, that would be great.  

@Mike M. this deal is actually listed on the mls brought to me by my realtor so no waybtoo really avoid realtor fees.

If I were trying to avoid financing roughly 25% of this new purchase, how do the numbers work if I bought a 400k property? 

Be sure to read 13-15 on disaster area losses.A tax professional is probably a good idea, but I'd avoid any who are shouting about how you can get big bucks out of Uncle Sugar on Facebook. 

And I think if I had alot of rentals (50+), I would be very careful to avoid too many month to month (for risk of mass vacancies at one time) and try and stagger terms more.Best of luck!

So, I would definitely avoid that. 

I would avoid the war zones though.