Accellerating purchases through financing?

[Gustin Stamatinos]

Hello all! Pretty fresh meat here. I've listened to, read, and watched hundreds if not thousands of hours of material over the past decade, but have not or do not remember advice regarding accelerating your purchasing power. I've bought my first two homes with VA loan entitlement and currently rent the first one out at a positive cashflow while living in the second for at least the term of minimum occupancy (likely longer) so that our monthly living goes to equity instead of rent.

I am trying to determine how to best accelerate our purchasing power for new investments. We've looked at potential small business loans (SBA 7a or 504) until we realized that those are only applicable if your small business is occupying 51% of the real property purchased and not as real estate investment per se.

Is the only way to continue to build our real estate portfolio, saving up 20% down payment for FHA loans? Is there no way to finance that down payment (so long as the numbers make sense) in order to more quickly leverage other people's money and add to our portfolio?

There are a few locations that we're looking at where the estimated rent value would be around double the mortgage payment in a stable economic area and we would like to be able to pick up some of these properties sooner rather than later.

Thank you for the advice and information in advance!