Kickoff a BRRRR with heloc?

[Steven Skarupa]

Although I'm new to real estate investing, I've bought and renovated a couple primary residences. Now I want to get to the promised land and cut my day job.

3 years ago I bought a vacation home near Cape May, nj for 155k(cash), put in 60k in rehab and just got a cma for 268k. Yah!!! 53k in profit! But, we're emotional attached to this property so not interested in Airbnb or renting it.... But I'm thinking hard about how to leverage the capital in the house and kick off a BRRRR.

What do you think about getting a heloc on this house and then treating the funds almost like a private lender to myself. Once I'm through to refi step in my BRRRR, I'd return the money to the heloc until the next deal and then repeat.

Seems like I could do this for n houses and I'd only have to pay interest on the heloc as holding costs until I got a tenant and refi on each rental. Hopefully earning equity on the rehabs along the way, so I would be using a smaller and smaller portion of the heloc over time(or being able to go for larger duplex/multi fam properties)...

Does this make sense? What am I not thinkng of? What am I risking if I do this? And how would you mitigate it? Are there other alternatives besides heloc and cash out refi?

Thanks in advance!