His rent covers most of the PITI and my wife and I cover the rest (+ extra for Maint, Vacancy, and Capex).

Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Re-Sell, and RepeatThe idea being: you buy the property and fix it up, then rent it out to cover holding costs, re-finance to a conventional loan (if you used hard money etc. for the original loan), then resell the property after the year lease is up.

If you want to make some assumptions about the long term future state, and you plan on holding a LONG time (10+ years), then I suggest you look at historical pricing and rents to determine average appreciation rates over the last 10, 20, 30 years which would cover several boom/bust cycles.

By about 3% per year, which your tenants are covering if you are increasing rent by on average at least 3% per year.

Yes, I realize it's much easier to just hire contractors who carry liability and worker's comp, and we're doing this for much of the work, but for smaller projects/day laborers, I'd like to have our own worker's comp even if it means everyone we're covering then becomes an employee (with payroll tax, etc). 

I think 2 years of landlord experience and you can use your rental income, however they typically want to see 75% of your rental income covering the mortgage.

Even if they hadn't trashed up the place there would have been paint anyway.You need to find properties where your 50% of your rent is enough to cover your debt service.

., and $1k a year will never cover everything that eventually need to be replaced.

I was then able to negotiate the price down to have bank cover 75% of a new roof.

.  :-)The window coverings came in today, and I have a couple of other decorative items on order.