Seem to Be Out of Options for Conventional Financing. Advice????

[David Johnson]

Hey everyone,

I'm currently in the market for another investment property, but it seems as if I have maxed out on my ability to acquire conventional financing. It seems like a strange problem to me, since I have a lot of capital available (approx. $275K) and it seems like people are able to build out pretty huge portfolios using financing. 

Part of the issue is that I'm looking to buy a new investment property in the market in which the two others I own are located (Washington, DC), but the minimum price for property acquisition in that market without having to do a substantial amount of work is in the $300K range.

Some background:

I currently have two conventional, 30-year, fixed rate mortgages (one on my own, one with a co-borrower [my father]) on two single family homes and when I looked into getting pre-approved for another loan around this time last year, the lender I was going to use told me that my debt to income ratio was too high. So you know, one loan is worth about $213K and the other is worth about $185K, giving me a debt load of about $398K total.

At the time, I was earning about $57,500 a year from a job, in addition to a modest income from my two rental properties (about $600 a month in cash flow after covering the expenses of the mortgages and property management).

I have since quit my job to focus on real estate investment full-time (so essentially no income from another job) and re-financed one mortgage and am getting new Section 8 tenants at both properties, so the cash flow will now be about $2100 a month total. I know that's not that much income, but that's why I want to add another property to the portfolio to increase that number.

I'm not sure if this is helpful information or not, but I have a pretty substantial amount of equity in both properties through appreciation. One was purchased for $250K and the other was purchased for $270K and the latter was recently appraised at $400K.

What are my options as far as financing goes? I'm trying to avoid the approach of putting all cash in and then financing after the purchase, but I'm not sure how else to proceed. I'll admit I'm a novice when it comes to financing strategies, so any insight you could provide would be very helpful.

Thanks in advance for your help!