With that being said, assuming you have owned this home for years and are now trying to access some of your hard earned equity through a HELOC, expect the bank to cap you out at 80% of the already conservative value they have given your property in the desktop evaluation to begin with.

Without seeing your ROI it's hard to tell you whether to pull the trigger or not.

I am telling you this because once they get themselves into a situation that they cant even pay their rent it is very hard for them to fix it.

All of the hard money lenders I've been looking up appear to take at least 2 weeks to close and since this will be my first deal, I expect that they will take longer to approve the funding (if they go through with it at all).  

There are also a few real estate meet up groups in the area you should check out.Keep those goals in front of you as you will achieve success if you try hard enough and connect with like minded people.

I am actually in the middle of a Rehab for a BRRRR strategy and I will be putting a tenant into the property soon and hope to refi out of my short term hard money.  

If you have a lot of experience in real estate investing, is there something in particular that makes this deal hard to price? 

So if you were to buy with a hard money or renovation loan, and you buy it right, you could buy and fix up a house with no money out of pocket with the right lender and as long as your purchase, reno costs and reno loan costs are under 70% of the value of the home, you could then refinance into a permanent loan and hold it.There are some smaller local banks that have a rehab to permanent where you can buy the house and renovated it with the construction loan and without "refinancing" the loan converts to a permanent loan after the renovation is complete.

Do you use hard/private money or do you fund it out of your own pocket?

I know there is a lot of hard work involved and I am up for the challenge!