Purchase price: $280,000 Cash invested: $7,000 Light rehab, rent, and 30 month balloon to refinance.

My strategy is to buy properties for cash, rehab, rent them out, and refinance.

As an alternative, would a cash-out refinance, a home equity loan, or a HELOC make sense for you?

If it will take you 2 to 3 years, and you can refinance this before you break even, you are better off planning to do a refinance and save your money on the buy down. 

Financing options include cross-collateralization, cash-out refinance, and DSCR loans.Good luck!

At that point, you potentially could refinance to just to grab more liquid cash out of those homes too.  

This would make it into two, two bedroom units with the intent of making them long term rentals.I'm guilty of having a lot of projects going at once so my focus right now is bringing the cottage to a point to refinance out of the private money and either make it our primary residence for a year for the financing perks or to go straight into a short term rental.With the four bedroom house I'm trying to decide if it's worth splitting into two units or if I should keep it a four bedroom rental.The cottage I'm also tempted to do mid term with to lower the turnover and maintenance but open to suggestions.The third property I'll probably just let the current renters pay the mortgage for the time being if I'm able to acquire it anytime soon.

It may be a tough rate for you to swallow, but it may be worth it to secure the properties then refinance in a few years.

I could maybe sign up with that theory if the GPs were using the side hustle money as a way of cutting or eliminating their fees & salaries altogether while they try to hang in long enough to hope for enough rate cuts to refinance or the market to unfreeze and let them unload at least at break-even, but I bet none of them do anything of the kind. 

Conventional loans that use your debt to income / DTI to structure the loan require 12 months seasoning to use the new appraised value for a cash out refinance.