If you would like to get more than the cash you paid for the property and use the new appraised value, the shortest period I've seen is 3 months of waiting period between when you closed on your last loan or transaction to when you close on your next loan / transaction.More on DSCR loans in case helpful: DSCR loans won't use your income to underwrite the loan.

I've dabbled in hard money for a few years on both sides of the transaction and here are the 3 types of people in the business.

A 1031 Exchange is a real estate transaction that takes advantage of a Federal tax law, so the state you do it in is of no consequence.

Though fee schedules vary by company, generally speaking, you'll pay more up front for checkbook control and less over time, since the full custodial companies will have transaction fees not to mention the red tape of going through the custodian for all transactions. 

Next is use credit as a transactional tool.

Based on research it appears Zelle is the only option that does not have a transaction fee for landlords.I did not include maintenance as a category since this can be done easily in a spreadsheet, but all of the options actually had pretty good maintenance and expense tracking.For Tax Support, all of the tools met the minimum for being able to export the financial information. 

I'd say forget the AI buzzword hype and go back to programming something useful based on real transaction-level data like below (that can help you with any deal you find, from whatever source you have).Sales Comps & ARV estimate:Market Stats:AI won't be able to provide you anything close to this, nor does the RedFin/Zillow market data drill down into the market as deep as I do here.Additionally, if you understand how the leading LLM's work based on a black-box floating point matrix, you just can't trust their conclusions like you can with your own program.

My thought is is use the Rent Ready feature of reporting his payment history to the credit bureau so it can work in his favor as a trade line, but I'm wondering if this is an unnecessary added step since he can already pull transactions on his bank side. 

One thing to watch out for is the financing aspect of it - could be a hurdle getting a loan if the transaction is "non-arms length" - i.e. between "Friends" - might be worth looking at seller financing too

We may have crossed paths at a previous PadSplit meetup.