How to Achieve Cash Flow with Portfolio Loans

[Max Tedford]

Question for the hive mind:

I've just started to branch out into portfolio loans for my small multi-family purchases and most of the loan products I'm seeing local lenders offering make it seem incredibly difficult to achieve acceptable cash flow, even when some of the properties on the market hit the 1% rule or higher.

For example, lenders are generally quoting me loans at 4.65-ish% interest on a 5-year term, amortized over 20 years, with an 80% LTV.

The problem seems to be the 20 year amortization. I can find a reasonable number of deals in my market that hit the 1% rule and would give me nice juicy CoC returns of 12-15%+ when working with conventional 30-year fixed rate loans, but when amortized over 20 years it blows up the cash flow to the point that the CoC falls to 1-5%.

Based on the research I've done, these terms seem pretty standard for portfolio loans, so my question is do I just have to find and buy more triples and homeruns when using portfolio loans? How do others achieve their desired cash flow when working with loans that amortize over shorter periods? Am I missing something?