Is it a good idea to purchase homes seperately to avoid the 10 mortgage rule or should we focus instead on our combines income to reduce the debt to income ratio?

Interesting, compared to this - "The National Association of Realtors estimates that the country’s supply of for-sale and rental units combined is 3 million units short of current demand."

@Charles Wiegert, the numbers you find on Loopnet (and pretty much anywhere else) are crap until proven otherwise.

I am going to the new company but once I get officially "laid off" I want to combine my 401k with my IRAs and invest.

A vast majority of my acquisitions come from a combination of private investor funds and my own capital. 

You can use the calculators on here to present the deal to a buyer(free for 3 uses unless you upgrade to a pro account) with a breakdown of the estimates(you want to be as accurate as possible), and you can find templates for the contracts here(but your contract should be reviewed by an attorney in your area), and there are plenty of list services(a lot of people mention List Source) and direct mail services(sometimes combined with list services).

@Dave Foster,  so you can have a TIC combined under one entity?  

Of course we would look to purchase further houses using this method, each time combining 5 deposits/leveraging other properties to put a larger dent in the loan that would be possible if I was investing by myself. 

I've been using Zillow in combination with those.  

If you are not there, you will definitely need a money partner, so your combined networth would exceed the loan amount.