Spouse on mortgage for primary home mortgage, myself for rentals?

[Pat Al]

Hi,

I tried searching the forums but couldn't find the answer so sorry in advance if this is a commonly asked question.

My wife and I each have jobs with high W2 income. We live in a community property state, file taxes jointly, have a joint bank account, etc.

We want to purchase a primary home that will probably cost close to $1M and then over time multiple rental properties at probably $100K each.

We were thinking of putting the primary home mortgage in her name only (with both of us on the title) and then putting the rental property mortgages in my name (with both of us on the titles, or maybe in an LLC or something... haven't got that far yet).

The goal of the plan being to get the most amount of leverage and borrowing power from our two incomes. Is this a good idea and would it actually increase our borrowing power? Advantages? Disadvantages?

From my uneducated perspective, it seemed that the lenders would see that we're married and use both of our income, credit scores and existing debts to decide the available loan amount regardless of who applies for it. But I've been told by a few friends that have done this type of thing in the past that the lenders just focus on the existing debt of the person on the mortgage to determine the available loan amount so that it makes sense to split things like this for more borrowing power. They said that if you are both on the mortgage then the debt shows up for both of you and is a sort of "double whammy" that ultimately decreases your borrowing power despite the fact that you also have double the income.

Thanks in advance for your help!