@Caleigh McDonough House hacking with 5-10% down is viable if long-term appreciation and equity building align with your goals, even if the property doesn’t cash flow immediately.

For you're first investment, choose your home market, if you can make it work.

Because of all of this depending on your investment goals, one may make more sense than the other. 

The key is to assess your current financial position and goals.

I've got my long term goal....retirment income in 10-15 years figured out, identified and traveled to a few markets I think could work. 

My ultimate goal is to keep scaling buy 2-3 LTR and hopefully a 4+ plex hopefully within the next 12 months.

I'm looking towards house hacking my way to least 10 properties is the goal Not at all, it's smart, but you still want to be careful because you don't know what you don't know.

Often people making the mistake of choosing the right time to get buy a home.

Meaning the at the end of the lease, the tenant has the option to buy (but not the obligation) whereas the seller has the obligation to sell if the the buyer chooses to buy (works just like selling stock options!)

There are a lot of factors that go into this and a lot of levers to pull.If none of this works and the goal of the new purchase is to househack that property into an investment property, you may be able to use a DSCR loan to buy the new property as an outright investment property.