Are you tracking your current response rate?

Do not cut any corners on estimates to make something look better on paper but is not real..Track all income and expenses by project and in report form and review them regularly with a few other people you trust and understand your goals and plans.   

@Andrew Martin...You are on the right track.  

who's going to track materials and labor costs for you? 

And Quicken/Rocket Mortgage has a really bad track record of NOT completing their loans.

Track Comparable SalesAlthough we are still hovering near the all-time lows with respect to the 10-year treasury, consider that for every 1 percent rise in interest rates it takes somewhere in the neighborhood of an 8 percent increase in Net Operating Income to remain at par as far as your property value is concerned.

The underwriter would not give us credit for the rental income because we didn't have 2 years of tax returns showing rental income.So basically they looked at the duplex as a mortgage expense on our debt to income ratio, but gave us no credit for the rental income.Once you get a track record of rental income, the underwriters will give you credit for a large portion of it. 

I do know that if you're not a RE professional and even if you're actively managing your real estate assets you will not be able to write off any of your passive losses from your rental real estate when you're over 150k AGI (you mentioned you were 190k AGI - prior to itemized deductions and exemptions).Also the other thing is that when accountants go to create your depreciation schedule they dont take the 1.75M and divided it over 27.5 years.They typically (other wise proven via engineering study or cost seg report) use the LA/ventura county tax assessors value for land and improvement(building) and they take that percentage on the assessors website and apply it to your 1.75M sales or acquisition price to determine your depreciable basis.So for example, if the improvement was 80% of 1.75M then you have a depreciable basis of $ 1,400,000 / 27.5 years = $ 50,909.10 annual write off.Back to the above REpro, if you're not a REpro, you wouldnt be able to write off anything against your active/earned income and you feel the full brunt of the tax man unfortunately.

Track all income and expenses of your projects in report form and review that regularly with people you trust in an attempt to reduce expenses and increase income.  

I think I'm on the right track!