1) I use 3 times the rent to be eligible to rent  this is a HARD number and I don’t go below it ever  because it is 1/3 the gross salary of the individual which is customarily the amount recommended for owning a home or any budgeting classes or lecture or anything   So for me this is the pass fail item   If I can not verify the amount then it doesn’t count as income  2) I use 600 for a credit score minimum in my advertisements, however my tenant pool is typically 525-600 scores.  

That would at least be SOMETHING, and so it might be better than leaving 1.25 million of equity just sitting on the table untapped, but it feels kind of disappointing because it ties up a huge chunk of equity and fails to fulfill either of my two main goals: generating monthly income, and serving as a significant vehicle for further expansion in the near term.Several apparent ideas I'm actually NOT interested in trying are: investing out of state, partnering with other investors, and expanding into parts of NYC that can still be called "bargain" areas (in the later phases of a multi-year superbubble like ours, such places tend to be mind-blowingly distressed and they are simply beyond my comfort zone).

Sooner or later, the day will come when your strength fails you, and a golddigger will find a way past your erected defenses.

You have already tried and failed?

It's already difficult when your contractor fails to pay their employees or their subs.

I felt like, if I was going to fail, I was going to do it on my own terms in the future...so I found a crappy SFR in a good area, made an offer which was accepted, then BRRRR'd it successfully.

The properties I was sent not only didn't meet my criteria, but I found out they were actually recently expired MLS listings that had been marked up ~$15k from their previous list price that they failed to sell for, and the comps they sent were not even close to being accurate, so it all seemed very shady actually. 

If I do not change the "door operator" now, then when it fails in the future (now-5 years) it will require upgrading the entire elevator. 

Not all..... but many of the "hot areas" for TK rely on the draw of "cash flow" but fail to point out that the 70k property you buy will be worth 72k in 10 years....again, not all, but many.

NEVER failed to get a pipe fitting apart that way.