Yes forget about it, and in fact treat those properties as properties you MUST avoid!

You're better off getting a good HVAC vendor that will treat you right and get the job done.

Their position is, there's no rental agreement and you haven't been treating it as a rental on your tax returns, so they're not considering it a rental property and not considering anything your family gives you as rental income to offset the mortgage obligation.On the general point though, the new lender's proposal of taking a bigger primary residence loan and paying off your second home, yes I think it would benefit them (bigger loan amount and more interest), but I also think it would benefit you.Think about it this way, right now you're paying 4.5% on 67K and 5.25% on 180K, or over 12K in interest a year.

Instead, they are treated as suspended losses from a former passive activity [Reg. 1.469-9(e)(2)].

I would definitely treat your question as 2 parts.  1) how do I pull out cash from equity.  2) how to best buy a second property. 

I wouldn't expect much cash flow here but if that isn't the primary concern rising prices, rising rents and prop 13 should treat you reasonably well.

$1K is fine, $2500 might be better.... depending on what kind of reserves you have and how to treat insurance. 

Personally I would trust tenants with an excellently trained animal over a tenant w/o one because the level of responsibility proves to me the tenant does not take owning a pet likely and would treat the rented space with respect.

I've always thought this was fair and how I would want to be treated if I was the tenant. 

They need to be out of the unit for about 3 hours.The treatment needs to include all units in order to be effective, as otherwise the roaches will migrate through walls to non-treated units.