Tampa can work, but yes, taxes and insurance are higher and might keep cash flow tight.

@Mark Toweya couple things - from the seller's perspective, it means the seller doesn't have to wait the full 30 years to get the proceeds, and from the buyer's perspective, hopefully in that 5 years appreciation and maybe some updates have increased the value such that when you refinance you don't have to bring any additional cash.  

I don't have a ton of cash right now so figuring how to do it all creatively is definitely in my priority list.

Seller won’t budge on price and it will be tight for cash flow.

I personally would stay away from condo-tels as they will be even worse and you'll have less opportunity to cash flow. 

Quote from @Dylan Webb: Hello, here's my situation:My wife and I own several properties separately.2 of the single family homes combined we have conservatively $150,000 in equity ($90,000, $60,000) I want to use one of these as collateral for a small loan of $30,000 to put down on a high cash flowing property OR have a lender finance the whole venture at a purchase price of $160,000.

I went from growing up in a hut in Vietnam and spending my early years in Section 8 housing in the U.S. to now owning four cash-flowing properties (8 units) across three states.

However, there's an obvious loophole to the claim because if you buy a house for 999K and then the value goes over 1 million then technically you're one of the 90% that just became a millionaire through real estate :) REIT investing is a much less active way of investing into the 11 major real estate sub-sectors, in the US we have 274 listed REITs on the major exchanges of NYSE and NASDAQ, and about 75-80 of them are not equity REITs but rather mortgage REITs, which I like to park cash in when 10yr yields are trending down to give me capital appreciation plus 14-15% dividend yields. check out alreits | Global REIT Researchto do more thorough individual research.

However, it is important to note that if a leverage you're looking for doesn't qualify with DSCR, it means that your cash on cash return is negative (because it means your NOI or Rent is lower than rent -in most cases).So if you want to maximize leverage and are less cash flow sensitive (okay being negative), then conventional makes sense.

Cash flow is definitely the biggest challenge; both in terms of finding properties to buy that cash flow with a loan on them and just company wide given interest rates and labor/material is up and, at least where I'm at in Jackson County, MO, taxes are way up too.