Personally, In your shoes I'd just go the airbnb route.

For you category 1 folk, remember that you too were in my shoes at one time and that many, many others on BP are in those shoes. 

However, the owner uses, as the realtor put it, the old shoe box method of accounting.

Granted, this comes with its own challenges and demands, but if your biggest sticking point is your DTI, this is the most common sense way around it I would think.Another thing I might try, were I in your shoes, is to strike up conversations with local community banks or other portfolio lenders whose underwriting standards are different from a standard mortgage lender who is planning to sell your loan to Fannie or Freddie.Hope that all helps!

If I were in your shoes I would put 50% down on a 3-500k property somewhere and use this as a learning experience.

If I were in your shoes - this is a deal at least worth moving forward on and investigating further.

If I was in your shoes I would skip Lazy and go with the podcasts from real people that aren't out to profit from it.

If I were looking for housing via Craigslist I would be very wary of any of those two-sentence ads you see with no photos and poor grammar.With all that said, dropping the price down to $1195 isn't a bad move necessarily, but if I were in your shoes I wouldn't feel in a rush to do so just yet.

Shoe boxes full of receipts is not the way to run a business.

... soon it will be snow shoes on the ground up here ... well, ok, not for a couple of months ;-)If someone on BP ever gets inclined to go further east than Maine, yet remain on the continent, I may be of some assistance.