New Real Estate Investors - What Entity?

[Peter Hynes]

Hi folks.  New to the site and new to real estate investing (although I just finished with The Book on Rental Property Investing).

My uncle (age 57) and I (age 48) want to start investing in residential single-family real estate. 

Being that we both have individual assets to protect, an LLC would seem like a no-brainer, except for the fact that setting up an LLC would rule out conventional loan sources. Should we set up an LLC and forego conventual loan sources? Or should we operate as sole proprietors and use liability insurance to protect against lawsuits and have access to conventual loan sources? Or should we create another entity like LLP or an S-Corp?