Opinions on next step

[Andrew Rich]

Hello BP community, 

I am another new investor looking to the BP community for some advice on what your opinions are for my next step in my investing career. I am currently active duty Army and just moved to the Tacoma/JBLM area in December 2019. I bought a 3/3 SFH using the VA loan in Yelm, WA with the intent of doing some renovations myself while we were living in it over the next few years and then when we PCS'd I was going to rent it out. I am actually way ahead of of my timeline with the renovations and am looking for some advice on what you all think would make the most sense for my next step. I bought the house for 350,000 and based off of the Redfin/Zillow estimates (I know there not exact) that I have been watching over the last year it has our house estimated at somewhere between 408k-444k. Once the renovations are completed I plan on getting the house appraised to get a more accurate number. Based off some of the comps in the area I think its going to be somewhere in the 420k-430k range. So I will have roughly 70k in equity. I also have roughly 40k cash saved up in order to continue investing in rental properties. The biggest question I have is should I rent my current house out without refi/heloc and utilize the 40k I have saved in order to purchase a rental property or pull equity out and utilize both? Houses in this area are really expensive and hard to find where the numbers work to create cash flow with just the 40k but it is possible. What do you all think is my best option to continue buying more investment properties. Sorry for the long post but any advice would be greatly appreciated.

-Andrew