Buy & Hold With No Money Down?

[Clint Weir]

Is it possible to purchase a rental property with no money down? I have been concentrating mostly on looking for properties that I can either wholesale or fix and flip to bring in some cash first, but finding any of these consistently, or at all, is proving to be difficult. 

Most of the properties where I'm looking are being picked up by investors that are doing a quick fix on them instead of a total rehab so they can get them back out on the market as a rental property. I can't compete with what they're paying for them when I'm figuring the MAO where a major rehab is in the equation.

I have plenty of cash to purchase a property to buy & hold, but don't want to tie up the funds if another deal comes along. I had planned to use hard money to acquire properties to flip in order to keep my cash reserves in place, but this strategy wouldn't work for rental properties that I planned to hold on to.

Conventional financing is not an option, either, at this time due to some credit issues from the past. So how do I acquire rental properties to create some cash flow in the mean time while I'm still searching for fix & flips?