Financing buy and hold property in MI with just ok credit

[Natalie Bruce]

Hey there fellow investors!

My husband and I have decided to make the leap into buy and hold real estate investing.  We have quite a bit of equity built up in our home, and would like to take the equity to finance the purchase of our first property.  We have currently come across TWO properties that we are interested in purchasing to double our cash flow.  While we have already been pre-approved for the refi on our house, we have less than stellar credit (602) to get an investment loan.  Originally the plan was to refi enough to purchase first rental property outright and then leverage that in a few months to fund the next purchase once our scores have improved a bit and we qualify for an investor loan.  

However now that we've come across two properties, I'd like to refi enough to put 40% down on each and mortgage the rest on each of them individually.  We were told by our investor mentors that our credit scores weren't quite good enough to qualify for loans on properties that we were not going to live in.  I'm wondering if there is any way around this, so that we can have both buy and hold properties to start.  Or am I crazy and we should just start with one property and see how it goes?