Planning for Purchase in the Next Few Months

[Brook W.]

Looking for advice on what avenues to try for our next rental purchase. We have a duplex and a SFR right now. I did some research before purchasing the SFR this spring, but now I am feeling much better educated and feel like I could have gotten a better deal. It's OK because it was a learning experience and the loan was for 40k, so it could have been worse! I just didn't get great terms or a good interest rate.

Here's the basic situation:

Own a duplex outright-- 10 years of proof of rental income
SFR rental with about 50% of the purchase price leveraged (owned by LLC)
Personal home w conventional loan
Investments are doing well and we both have jobs that cover living expenses
Mediocre credit score-- it's not terrible but is low enough that banks are cautious-- this is my score, and my spouse is pretty much staying out of the rental property thing and letting me take the wheel; his is a little better.

The kind of property we will be looking to buy later this year is worth about the same as our savings. We are super conservative and don't want to buy w cash, and want to maintain enough savings so we're not over leveraged. By October or so, we should have enough padding to put 20% down on the kind of property we want while maintaining the same level of savings.

Earlier this year I couldn't find many banks that were amenable to loaning against our cash b/c of my tepid credit score, particularly since we are very interested in 4-family buildings.

As I've been reading more it sounds like there are MANY more options out there besides conventional loans. If you were in this position, where would you begin to look?