And I am under a bit of pressure to act prior to mortgage rates rising to 6% and to generate a few hundred bucks in cash flow.

I would think private money would be the best direction to go; keep your money in reserve in case you encounter any surprises on the originlal project or in the event another opportunity presents itself prior to finishing the original project; While your involved on in one project, you always have to seek out the next one.

Where are the prices now compared to when they bought them?

@Trevor Lohman - there is a very interesting discussion on crowd funding going on right now (http://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/520/topics/105106-comparing-crowdfunding-sites-for-re?

I wish I had discovered Bigger Pockets prior to buying this house as there were some mistakes made that we could have avoided after reading the wealth of material on BP.

All residential properties (1 to 4 units) are valued based on the comparable sales approach (using "comps").

I would love to hold properties in perpetuity, but given my grandparents and their parents, are no longer here, the prospect is doubtful.I'm one of these numbers driven geeks - 2.5 decades in software development and design may play a part - and, as such, all our properties were modelled prior to acquisition.

To compare, I looked into rental furniture for doing the staging set up ourselves.

FM generally claims to have gotten an appraisal (or some sort of valuation) prior to listing and adjusted for damage, repairs, etc.

In my opinion you should look anyway to compare rates. 20% seems high but again, I'm not in the vacation rental arena so that my be normal.