As for a lot of the "your returns will be better with more leverage" that is typically true if your unleveraged yield is higher than your cost of capital.  

HELOC appraisals are notoriously low, just part of the game. 

Kind of like a game of craps.

Estoppel letters are signed by each tenant and counter-signed by the owner as true and correct.

sounds like you are on the right track - house hacking or BRRRR to jumpstart the journey is a pretty solid tried and true gameplan

@Jeff Sitti  I hope you are a true friend to this person.    

I am not sure it is true in either case.

Quote from @Luis Maza: Hi all, returning to the game this year and would like to pick your brain a bit, we started working with a wholesaler that will send us properties here and there with the "wholesale" price, but every time we check the properties and add the numbers, the margins are, well, I am not sure, too low perhaps, maybe we are getting to picky, but this is my dilemma for example...Today we got a property, wholesale price 300K, rehab about 50-60K, ARV is about 440k, but with the cost of hard money, we have about 100k cash, hard money interest at 11%, keeping the property for 90 days while we finish the rehab, closing costs,  commissions, we ended with 30k profit before taxes, while it sounds appealing, adding up all expenses and cost we ended up expending 50K on rehab(labor/materials) and about 50-60K with cost of the loan, interest, commissions, etc, everyone makes money, happy with that, but it seems that we are working to produce a 100k for everyone else, while we make 20-30k if everything goes well...In my opinion, we are not really getting "wholesale" price, it seems that we either buying to expensive, rehabs are much more than we would like to spend and the cost of borrowing that money is too high...We came up with thoughts as: lets fund it ourselves with money from a close friend/partner that we will bring in, and that would save us 10-15k here and there, but still, is that the norm now?

You have to find a way to implement your game plan within the confines of either an LTR or STR DSCR underwrite assumption.

For example, we finish the basements with indoor/outdoor carpet (instead of LVP, which makes it feel a lot more homey), because we know parents go nuts in the winter if they can't send the kids downstairs to pay - or have a space for the guys to watch the game on Sunday.