Ive been in deals with a timeframe between 3 and 7 years.In addition to equity, you can invest and earn interest in debt funds.  

Rental Value.Now to my original point.If you can't bring in enough rent to cash flow comfortably over and above your total debt service on the property, it's not a deal and you don't buy it.

Should I be debt free before I buy rental properties?

A third strategy is to put all the debt not on your current residence but on the next home to be acquired and you can add all the rehab dollars into it as needed.

shop around if you want typical conventional agency debt then 20% but you could also do a conventional rehab, but why are you not open to non or sub prime non doc type loans or BRRR strategy

Project 80% complete, migrating out of hard money into permanent debt structure, seeking non-recourse loan to fund the final leg of work and repay HML in one go.

You can get a HELOC for half that rate.You wrote "...tap into my home's equity without taking on the burden of direct debt," but of course you still have debt, it's just under a different name/structure. 

If you're debt service is higher than 45% of the rent rate, you're probably not going to cash flow.

That approach is to have the debt from the start amortized over 30 years as a rehab & purchase loan if you can scrape together a 15% down payment based on sum of purchase price plus rehab dollars needed.

While not necessarily the belief of most on here, we wanted to be debt free in our retirement, so the faster we could get there, the better.We balance between index funds and real estate, with some other business interests thrown in for fun.