This may be true if its the standard first time buyer who has no mentor or real estate investing experience or if we're just thinking from a one dimensional perspective which may be typical from most lenders whom are not investors themselves.Whose paying the MI is just semantics because a savvy investor could just as easily put 3.5% down on a owner occupied fourplex, live in one unit and rent the three units out, delegate the cost of MI to his/her tenants, improve the value of the property, refinance out to remove MI completely and only be paying MI for 6-8 months or so if they located the right type of value add deal.Those are the strategies BP'er want to hear not that you cant avoid MI with less than 20% down or 20% equity which only achieves to end the creative mind.

However, from tax perspective, it seems to me flipping houses under an llc or s corp pays more tax due to self-employment tax.

Not sure if single family homes are good from a rental perspective. 

I am somewhat familiar with DFW but not so much from an investing perspective.  

I'm curious to know from either a landlord or tenant perspective.

John...I hear you on free site guestimates....Here's my perspective...it's simple....may work for you...Zillow and Trulia are NOT buying houses....they are NOT the market...You are the market...you are the buyer...make an offer..give it a time limit to create urgency and move on....My thinking...They will be motivated on either the price offered or the terms..If the price (theirs) then my terms ...

Well, you're going to hit a point where the perspective tenants will just rent the house down the street that is on the market for about the same rent as every other vacant house in the neighborhood.

I am not familiar with this one but I would probably want to talk to some of their current and/or previous clients/students for their perspective. 

Absolutely, Joel Owens.From his perspective, it's not unreasonable to ask people to do *something* so they show they're committed - it's a big investment from the mentor side to spin someone up

From a selfish standpoint it works out well for me if people do this because they have less ability to compete with me for houses, but from a moral perspective I would not tell anyone to do this unless their cash flow was very close to the job, they had diversification, and no or little debt.