(1) That's highly unusual, unless she is short on equity.

I have 80-100k of equity in my house I can easily pull out.

You will sink some money into updates, but if you are willing to put in sweat equity, it really helps.

They would have had to stop it before 15 year mark for it to work in their favor at all.

What this is, is still very much a Roth IRA, just with different processing capacity and therefore the ability to invest outside the stock market into things like real estate, private equity and other allowable asset classes.Such an IRA is not a means for you to access funds to add to your real estate investing. 

Improvements appreciated my 20% equity.

How can I fully utilize equity in my rental properties? 

The appreciation of value in sweat equity was counted towards my down payment.

In terms of my personal start, when I learned of syndications, I started as an equity partner in someone else's deals and followed the process along while asking questions and observing what GPs in my investments were doing.

Instead of using hard money your using a HELCO of your own equity.