The properties I have been refinancing are in the $70-$80k value range and they were the only company that I could find that would do the loan as low as $50k so it's worked great for me.

Great part is she will almost certainly screw up the whole bidding war idea...that works best if you get the wide exposure a broker gives you and if you price it competitively to begin with.

I have been asked to spend thousands of dollars in the 5 figure range for courses and coaching programs.

Find someone in the mid price range. 

This service is more widely available now and my rationale for having that element remains primarily to speed my ability to respond to opportunity since I go to a lot of auctions. 

Do you have a budget you set aside for the rehab based on the price range the house you’re buying is in or is there some way you quickly approximate?

Many years before I became a realtor I was a USAF veteran working an IT job and was bedazzled by the market at the time and a "perfect" house and bought at the tippy top ceiling of my affordable price range (chasing that white picket fence dream, etc.), using my VA benefit. 

@Brad Hammond Could you recommend an appraiser that's doing duplex' in the $750-$1000 range?   

You can filter by the beds and baths and other aspects to make the results as close as possible to the one you're comparing.When I build my semi-automated hotsheet for investors, I take exports from the MLS from both the sales side and the rentals side, pull them into a SQL Server database, do some data cleaning to screen out as much of the garbage as possible, and run what I call my "magic query" that joins sale listing locations to rental listing locations by a conditional match on subdivision and beds/baths, or the average of the entire MLS if the subdivision is given as "METES & BOUNDS", with a flag in the output showing that those M 'n B rental numbers are MLS-wide averages for a given beds/baths and will need a more in-depth evaluation (like rentometer) if the estimated cash on cash return for a classic 20% down scenario, looks promising. 

I considered selling it but finding a house with similar specs puts us back in the 450-500k range and i figured a 347k loan looked more attractive, plus its a house we like.