Screening is very fast and complete - I can elect to accept CC and set the convenience fee (I do charge a tad above costs), and I find its pretty easy to reconcile a tenants payment via "serial number" or transaction ID reported to the bank with both Rentec accounting AND quickbooks - albeit Quickbooks is still manual for me (you can export from Rentec to Quickbooks via CSV... havent got that far along yet.We literally just completed several rehabs (meaning LOTS of expense), so seeing rents come in quickly and accurately is a relief for a change!

1. most banks/ credit unions are telling me I have to wait a minimum of 6 months after closing before I can get a cash out refi..

I have bought REO property--ones that are already foreclosed by the bank off auction.com.  

I noticed that a number of these had banks or mortgage companies listed as interested parties.

@Aditya MainiI think a mortgage bank would be your partner in the deal and underwrite it independently.

Some jurisdictions have limits on how much taxes rise, so you might be looking at an artificially low tax amount on an mls syndicated site that wont hold true for a new owner.

Otherwise, it's a super deep discount to what the bank will actually want to sell the house at.

Additionally, this would give you experience in property management, however, a bank might not like the fact that you want to use a loan product (HELOC) to open up another loan product (mortgage).

So by going this route we'd have to pay approx $150 more each month on our mortgage, but we'd be cutting out the wasteful PMI and have $25K in the bank to put towards an investment.

It does appear on my bank statements.