How to get financing for second property?

[Dakota Rice]

I currently live in a single family house that I am house hacking with my wife. We bought it with a low down payment conventional mortgage. After being in it for nearly a year, we would like to purchase another property and do something similar there. We don’t have enough funds to do 25% down on the next property (which we were told we would need by the lender). I haven’t yet talked to another lender in the area, but I wanted to see if you guys had any thoughts first. We would like to do another low down payment so we can keep our reserves for repairs. Would we need to try and refinance our current house to see if all our sweat equity there would get us up to 20-25% on that loan in order to go get another low down payment on the next property? What are your thought/strategies?

Thanks!