They're often high quality and cost-effective.

I never had that come into effect on my single family home purchases since I never wanted to personally be on the hook for such a high mortgage, but I think it might come into play for an MFH. 

If you didn't pick a tool that quite obviously works because of a factor completely unrelated to the effectiveness of the product, my course can't help you, ..

I am a strong advocate for their effectiveness allowing you to do substantially more with your money. 

I ended up investing out of state in a more landlord friendly / cost effective market.First thing I'd recommend is figuring out your investing strategy (single family / small multi-family 2-4 units) and attend some local meet ups to network with other investors to learn from their mistakes.

Yep for one especially in the early stages a hard credit pull would not be useful, just have them do soft checks for the time being and opt out of credit solicitation: www.optoutprescreen.com I could be biased... that said typically working with one lender than can help regardless of where you're looking and having a relationship with that will provide the easiest and most cost effective route long term. 

He felt spending more time disputing the rejection was not cost effective and i see his point but suspect airbnb recognizes this and uses it to their advantage.  

Plus for its high cash flow potential, utilizing a 1031 exchange to reinvest gains effectively made this experiment a relatively low risk for me.

I've seen a lot of this lately where GPs are offering outside investors pref equity to effectively "save" the project from foreclosure.

Once you have the number of homes you want, you pour your cash flow and extra income into the smallest mortgage until it is paid off, then you move to the next and create a snowball effect.