Thirteen months in my own unit and the sewer line took the whole reserve

Sewer scope on anything with clay lateral and a tree in the front yard, every time. I skipped one on a duplex last year and paid $7,800 in month three, so I'm not going to pretend I learned it cheaply either. The part of your post that sounds too easy is renting your old unit at $1,500 the month you moved out. Did you have that lease signed before you left, or did you carry a vacancy?

Reading this to work out where somebody like me fits. You handled a collapsed lateral, a rent credit, and a lease-up inside thirteen months without a manager. Was there a point where you wanted to hand it to someone, or is a triplex you live in genuinely manageable alongside a job?

The rent credit interests me more than the $9,400. You gave up a month of rent on a repair that wasn't your fault, and that's the kind of decision a management company would have handled differently, maybe worse. How did you land on a full month?

Your triplex cleared the FHA three-to-four unit requirement because the appraiser's rent schedule on the non-occupied units covered the payment at the discounted rate underwriting uses, which is where most of these fail. That test and the discount applied to it change, so confirm the current version with your lender in writing rather than off a forum post.

The number doing the work in your post is $500 a month post-move-out. On a 1960s triplex, a common planning figure is roughly ten percent of collected rent to maintenance and something separate for capital items, and $500 against $4,400 collected is under that before you fund a single roof dollar. So the building is close to break-even once you allocate properly. That's consistent with the current version of this strategy, a payment made manageable rather than eliminated.

The assumption your outcome depends on is that you keep the FHA loan. At 3.5 percent down, the mortgage insurance premium under current FHA rules stays for the life of the loan, and the exit is a refinance into a conventional loan once the appraised value supports the loan-to-value. That depends on rates and value at the moment you want it, and neither is under your control. If you hold the FHA loan indefinitely, the premium is a permanent operating line and your $500 shrinks further.

On vacancy, you had zero turnover in thirteen months. Underwriting the next one at one turn per unit per year with two to four weeks empty each time would change your $4,400 to something closer to $4,100, which is the number worth stress testing before you buy again.

The $12,000 in closing costs and prepaids is what I keep underestimating. $18,200 down reads as the barrier and then the real check is $30,200. Did any of that come back as a seller credit, or did you write it all?