While it's true your old home may appreciate, this is gamble much like the stock market and I would not consider this a conservative investing move if these are the only "assets" you have (now if you are sitting on $1M with good liquidity... well different story). 

Smaller lenders and banks have "Overlays" and broker a lot of their loans so they are stuck with the tight guide lines. 

It definitely felt like a gamble. 

They do not play around with qualifications and guidelines.

If you want to learn and house hack, that's cool, just make sure you are buying a place that doesn't need obvious cap ex repairs in the near term, or you think it's going to appreciate and you wanna gamble. 

@Brendan Chase Most banks who lend with fannie mae and freddie mac guidelines will have 30 year products for investments!

All in all, our collections have been steady-to-better than pre-covid life.There are CDC guidelines you should familiarize yourself with that will answer most of your questions. 

Your agent should give you some guidelines of what to expect for the next steps. 

Be careful about buying a property to flip off of MLS, usually for more than a 20% increase in valuation you have to wait two years for FHA, which is the guideline you should follow as an investor as most buyers go FHA.

I, too am old enough to have lived through when these adjustable rate loans took you to a worse place than a fixed, however, now it seems no one really considers that an issue, I still say it's something of a gamble.