As others have said, you will get lent more money usually with rehab involved than on a straight acquisition loan.

@Dave AllenRecommend you first figure out the property Class you want to invest in, THEN figure out the corresponding location to invest in.Property Class will typically dictate the Class of tenant you get, which greatly IMPACTS rental income stability and property maintenance/damage by tenants.If you apply Class A assumptions to a Class B or C purchase, your expectations won’t be met and it may be a financial disaster.If you buy/renovate a property in Class D area to Class A standards, what quality of tenant will you get?

Prayers to all involved

We are experienced and have never involved anyone in our projects and have never used a loan outside of a conventional mortgage.

This applies both to single-family residences and multi-family buildings.Non-residential HVAC systems, such as those in office buildings, warehouses and shopping centers are eligible for bonus depreciation.

So, you say will I want to take some cash out using the 200k value but most programs will require you to wait some period of time from 3 months up to 12 months for conventional before you can use that 200k value to pull cash out.This seasoning does NOT apply to delayed financing as I mentioned in my post above.  

It would not surprise me if they were acquiring the paper and servicing rights to take an inside line on refi's for these customers if rates decline.Actually CFPB regs may NOT apply if the subject loans are investment or commercial property loans and not SFR owner occupied or consumer loans. 

Now, if they don't want to do that for whatever reason and don't have anybody to work with who would do that for you, I'd have to agree with you that they'd better invest at home rather than getting involved in something they don't understand.

I am very involved in our local real estate investor association and agree that in this central Florida market there are an over saturation of STRs as well.

From day one I treated my involvement in real estate as a real business.This means, I had an advertising budget, a lead generating and follow up process, a back end process and money source and above all an experienced mentor.