My brother has lived in the home as his personal residence since, but we are now in the process of renting it out full-time using a property manager. 

I was nearly scammed by a seller in the US who I met in person, met his "associates", toured the property with and everything, but my tip off to do more research was that he was against using a third party to hold funds in escrow even when I said I would personally pay all associated fees and noted that it would not delay closing at all. 

Can obviously mitigate access to the property by disabling the code if using a smart lock, but other than that, are there any advantages/disadvantages that you've seen?

What is the downside of using a commercial lender to purchase, my own cash to rehab, and then refinancing?  

I would think I could just start using a normal checking/savings account and no longer touch the credit available in the HELOC (and hence not have to pay interest on monthly expenses).

If you're up to the task, listing on Zillow or Redfin will be your best bet.There are numerous studies that show listing on the MLS will not only get you more net proceeds but also eliminate the liability from you as the owner by using a third party to sell the property.

You might want to create a list of 50-100 prospective properties that meet your criteria using a tool like PropStream, optimize it, and then market to that list up to 30 times a quarter.

@Miciah FurbayBuy a primary residence in a good area using a 5% down payment convention loan, don't max out your DTI, in 12 months buy another primary residence with another 5% down payment conventional loan and start renting out the first one.

Since we're a husband/wife in the trust, I'm concerned about using a single member LLC. 

This would be the first time I'm using a HELOC on my primary ($250,000 line) to try and obtain another property.