How to I set up this deal so it would benefit the current owners and ourselves.

The benefit I find with an out of province accountant (or one that covers several provinces) is their insight to where the deals are and what other investors are seeing/doing.

.$800x3=$2400-HOA$1350-mortgage$900=$150$1200x3=$3600-HOA$1350-mortgage$900=$1350I have difficulty seeing the benefit against the risk to my primary residence and to be honest scaling up would be difficult as I would loose money if units were not rented.Option 2 is a duplex property which would only scale slightly over time with upgrades.$2000-insurance/yard$525-mortgage$900=$575Option 3 would be to find a 3 unit building that could make between $1875 per month after all expenses and mortgage and scale to $3075.00 with upgrades.Of course option 3 is sounding better but finding a 3 unit building at my price is not going to be easy.The 1% rule is becoming clouded when factoring in the cost of the home refinance.Please provide feedback on my way of thinking.

For example if currently you are paying (for example) $800 in rent, but a House hack drops your monthly expenses to $400, that's not only more savings each month but also debt paydown, appreciation and tax benefits.

The benefit of a low cap rate in a value-add situation is the larger lever.

In today's market, private mortgages can go down to the mid 3's and have numerous benefits, including not on credit, lend to llcs, and no income docs.

There are also benefits of the LLC that you might want to take advantage of like flexibility when it comes to ownership, management, and taxation.

You will also need to convince the neighbors this benefits the neighborhood BEFORE the hearing.

Put another way...society says to go to college, get a job, work up the corporate ladder, and retire at 65 with social security benefits. 

With all the bathrooms and kitchens, the value of the land is a lower percentage, so more can be depreciated.Residential buildings can be depreciated faster than commercial, to shield a higher amount of cashflow from income.Aside from the above list, multifamily shares a lot of the same real estate benefits as retail, including the ability to drive income and appreciation through your own efforts.FWIW, a fourplex, triplex, duplex are a strange area of overlap between single family and true multifamily.