A good option to get your foot in the door might be to house hack and rent by the room.

@John Mezzoni I always put 20% down, it’s my comfort zone for keeping enough equity and hopefully payments low enough to leave some cash flow.

I wanted to have a strategy if/when I plan to buy the next house.

I've heard of some hosts adding to the house rules that the guests must complete those steps after booking on the OTA platform, otherwise the booking will be canceled.At my company, we don't do background and credit checks for OTA bookings, but we do ask why they're renting a MTR and who will be staying with them.

I also have a 240 sq ft house that I do an LTR out of.

Paying more only on one can give a chance to get the other house potentially refinance if the rates go down.

If we rent our house out, the tenant would likely cover our entire mortgage, but our HOA costs are high (they were raised a lot recently).

For example in Texas a finder is limited to a maximum fee of 10% of the net amount received by the beneficiary, thereby eliminating from profitability a significant percentage of deals.This is the same over hyped, over promoted, over promised, under performing opportunity as note broker, house wholesaler, etc.

I bought a single family house last year using a VA loan and at the time I had 12 units.

With the delayed settlement  agreement, would give you time to clean the house up a little and market the house using the short date sale method.