Also, focus on 2 years of job/income stability.Class D Properties:Cashflow vs Appreciation: Typically, all cashflow with little, maybe even negative, relative rent & value appreciationVacancy Est: 20%+ should be used to cover nonpayment, evictions & damages.Tenant Pool: majority will have FICO scores under 560, little to no good tradelines, lots of collections & chargeoffs, recent evictions.

Just remember: most negative reviews are written by problematic tenants.

I know with a house hack it would cost less upfront to start but will guarantee a negative cashflow the first year.

But everything I've read says you can't actually get a HELOC on a rental property in Texas.We're also not really interested in refinancing the Texas home - as we've got a 2.5% rate on it and any refinance at current rents would turn it into a cash-flow negative asset.Anyway - we think if we moved some other investments around we might be able to find the $137K to pay off the loan outright - owning the land. 

To be honest, most of the posts I've read are mostly negative towards lien purchasing, but I'm assuming someone out there is making money on this correct? 

Create a new Balance Sheet account, name it something like offset, and use that account, which will end up as a negative amount, and the total amount will be zero on the BS.What you want to do is create subaccounts, so you can pull a summary report and then collapse the rows in QuickBooks Online.

So my escrow account could technically be negative for some of the year if, for example, taxes are collected halfway through the year but everything would be settled by the end of the year. 

@Miguelli Fernandezif you buy something with 100% borrowed money, you will likely be cash flow negative every month. 

Some of my properties have appreciated and some months i do have to be negative in cashflow but i am holding on, improving my systems in place because i am doing it for the long term. 

This creates a negative initial position.