For plans that will pay off later, get into house hacking, save money for a first payment, meet people in local real estate groups and find a mentor, and put money into things that earn without much work like stock index funds or ETFs.

I do understand the draw having a tenant do this service and save some money, but sometimes paying the extra cash if worth more in the long run.Good luck,Noah  

when our current primary residence rates becomes 5% we'll be break even but then we'll be paying the same amount of mortgage on the new property with tenants in the basement. 

You should never pay upfront before any transaction. 

I’d like to figure out how he does that so I can just do it myselfThey are probably running a script built into the browser (Chorme likely), it could be done using a site similar to this site > https://simplescraper.io/, i haven't tried it, i rather just pay for it.

She pays modest pet fee per month.

Look into a hard money loan so you can get the rehab budget covered, and make sure the rehab budget is non-dutch so you do not pay interest on the rehab budget until you begin to make reimbursement draws.

The center of attention is the kitchen.

You might pay $100,000 less for a resale vs new with the same rent.Most new home communities do not allow investors.Many if not most of the HOAs for the new home communities are not friendly to investors.