People's tolerance increases and the the pain starts to come back and doctors are afraid to keep raising the dosage so then people start to buy them from whoever they can. 

Woodland Hills market trends indicate an increase of $10,000 (1%) in median home sales over the past year.

Want to hear your advise on how much the rent should be increase for such a good tenant.

I did do a fair bit of remodeling myself while I lived there.Best purchase we will probably ever make since it was 5k down for 160k duplex (worth 230k now after 10k or so in remodeling and increased rents) and cash flow of $800-900/month now!

Or just ask them what the biggest increases to value would be on the property and how much each would add, whether they can be done individually (sometimes doing one thing on a list won't improve the value as much as the whole list).  

With a bigger down payment (25%) your cash flow will increase some.

I wanted to put this out there as a contest to ramp up responses and ideas for creative financing approaches to see who can help me in figuring how best to structure the deal to minimize my risk, increase learning opportunities during the process, and maximize returns in light of minimizing risk.

So you have increased your equity position and have more investable cash than you started with. 

Personally, I suspect the time to invest in multi family is behind us for now (wait till next recession) 5 or 6 % cap rates and you have work to do and taxes to pay doesn't sound that interesting when I can get near 5% yields on high yield muni bonds-no taxes and no work.Consider Kitsap county/Bremerton/port orchard for better deals though even there prices have increased meaningfully.

My understanding of the strategy is that you would find a good investment property, increase its value and stabilize it, and then refinance.Pulling out cash from your primary residence tax-free can be great, as long as you are getting a better return than the additional interest you are paying.