My wife read online that if you use 1031 to purchase an investment property in NYC that as far as houses are concerned, you can only purchase a multi family house and not a single family house or houses.

see link http://www.dupageco.org/Recorder/3392/You can search personally or online.

Are there any crowdsourcing or other online opportunity that folks have found effective for something like this?

An assumable mortgage is effectively a 'portable' loan.

Check in with @Joseph Chiofalo for low down payment and strong investment property loan options.

I use her for loans, deeds, title work, closings, etc.

Currently you can find 1000sqft apartments in decent neighborhoods starting at $45k and homes starting at $60k , this is info i found online Bolivia is one of those places where people are still old school and you find the best deals by word of mouth.

I'd have interest in facilitating these types of deals and paying you that fee that's nothing for the value you are bringing if you really are. that's about 2 points on a hard money loan which isn't a lot, if you are flexible on payment structures we'd pay you out of construction draw proceeds each time we receive money we pay a portion of your commission back

Hypothetically, if I took over someones existing mortgage subject to and owned the property cause I have the title now, would I be able to get a home equity line of credit or equity loan on that property if it had a good amount of equity?

I’ve heard about ‘gap funding’ for fix & flips to cover down/closing/holding costs in addition to the hard money loan for most of the purchase price & rehab, but how realistic is it to secure that type of funding?