You are buying a cheaper property with more down, I just assume your costs for PITI would be lower than mine.

We showed the bank our plan to improve the NOI by doing those things and got them to lower the down payment by 5%.

Lower expenses?  

Part of me thinks a cheap solution could be skim coating the wood with some form of product to get it a bit smoother and then paint with a lower sheen.

As far as expenses, I budget 8.3% for vacancy so that I have a month reserve by the end of the lease, then lower it if the tenant renews for another year.

Of course this is obvious as Unemployment Rises we have lower Economic Activities.THEREFORE, if One were to look into UE and Recession, you don't look at when UnEmployment Rates are RISING, you look at when it is FALLING if you are interested in when the next recession will hit.How does that help us?

I am looking at getting an FHA or VA loan to fund the property with the low to no money down financing (since most lower end homes will be 300+K, so that means 60+k down payment).

Now in our market of PDX from what a bigger PM told me that only manages apartments he said some of the new construction does have stress IE by the time they started them and with cost rises in labor and materials .. the rents are not hitting performa and or over build and rents have to be lowered to fill the units both stressing the owners .

The returns are much lower than real estate notes but of course they are very secure (usually backed by AAA rated entities).

Marvin There are so many things to consider, the way I will go about it will be by acquiring a debt weapon, home equity line of credit maybe for 20,000 and use that to pay down your principal there are some good youtube videos that will explain how to pay down your mortgage faster and save thousands of dollars in interest, but you need to have at least $500 of cash flow each month for that to work or use that to pay of a car payment faster anything that will increase your debt to income ratio so you can start saving more money each month cut down your monthly bills pay off all credit cards anyway you can i will try to get out of any car payments sell the cars buy a use one before selling the house, rent a room is a big house. obviously like i said lots of things to think about do you have kids so maybe a roommate wont work and your finances with out looking at them is hard to plan but I will try to make that house the investment get created if you have good credit that’s exactly how i started i hustle pay down my principal using the HELOC technique and when my equity become more because of lowering the principal I call my lender and increase my HELOC amount to the point that i was able to buy a house cash using the HELOC my HELOC became my checking account and i was paycheck parking all my income in the heloc is hard to explain what i did in a text but i hope this help you in getting created and into looking at more information before you sell or selling is the best way to go about it.