When you hire the PM you may be able to write into the agreement that they hire the one you chose and it may give you a bargaining position to reduce the cost or eliminate the cost for the PM's fees for future upgrades and other properties you hire them to manage.

With your w2 income, you will be very favorable to banks if you don't already have a ton of debt. 

@John Arendsen  no mystery to CF on the debt side they are just HML  and if you equate it to CA lending rules were your allowed to fractionlize DT's they are basically doing the same thing pooling investors into a debt instrument. . they get rewarded with the points and servicing fee's.

You will need income statement, credit scores, proof of residence for the past two years, you need to have a debt to income ratio less than 43% I think it is. 

I check the listings to keep up on prices, do my reading here to keep up on things, paid off all debt except my mortgage to start building savings and building my credit higher, I also have access to 120k if need be, I feel a bit stuck.  

Others have helped me and so I am just paying my debt to BP.Don't worry about a healthy kickback.  

I would have not gotten myself into debt....

In general, How is DTI measured in relation to discharged debts still being paid but not reaffirmed?

Other successful people can tell you what they pay labor to do certain things. start getting estimates, but ask for labor only estimates. find out specifics. the more specific you can get someone to be, the more the process of elimination can tell you......Then materials, how much work are you willing to do to find out?

I put together a spreadsheet here to help potential house hackers quickly analyze whether or not a property qualifies.There are other FHA requirements concerning which you should contact your local lender, but determining whether or not a triplex or fourplex meets the self-sufficiency rule is a good place to start as this rule will immediately eliminate many properties from your search, especially in expensive markets.