House hack #1 to house hack #2 -FHA questions

[Erin Anderegg]

Hello!

My husband and I have lived in our duplex while house hacking for about 6 months and are initiating plans for our next house hack. Our current mortgage is an FHA loan where we put down 3.5%. We want to do another FHA loan for the next property, but I know you can only have 1 FHA loan at a time.

Do we need to refinance the duplex to a different loan product before searching for the next property? If so, has anyone had success with high LTV loans in this case? I haven't had the place appraised since we were under contract, but I doubt it's increased enough where we have 20-25% equity at this point.