My "real" career is a copywriter and marketing consultant so I fully appreciated your writing skills and we all sound very similar.

It used to be the case that people who couldn't qualify would use buydowns in order to qualify, because the temporarily bought down rate was what was used to qualify.

Just sayin ..this is why on these wholesaler threads where these folks who have zero sales skills and spend 30 k thinking that is going to do it..

@Ethan Cooke  thank you   and thank you to the rest who responded.as I am sitting here drinking my coffee I am thinking its probably not fair to the neighbors to do super short term rentals I have seen houses trashed by parties and my house has far to many nice things to even remotely risk that one.So probably either not rent it and leave it vacant or if I do take a 6 month lease at a time with a very well qualified NON smoking no animals tenant with a large deposit..

Also, a broker we are talking to said we easily qualify financially but her underwriter will require us to 1) move out of our townhome first into a temporary month to month rental, and 2) rent out our townhouse first and 3) then show the underwriter the 1-year minimum lease to satisfy them that we are not going to commit fraud and not move into the duplex. 

I also held a real estate broker license in Texas for about 30 years but I never did that full time.Part of that reason was from my father's commercial real estate experience at that time and my college degree gave me the ability to get it if you qualified for it and in Texas you go strait to a broker license. 

There is an old saying in Real Estate and Lending - Drive Until you Qualify!

I'm seeing difficulty in finding qualified renters for some landlords (who I've spoken to) and have seen an uptick in the number of units where prices are being cut, sometimes even 10-15% at a time. 

The fact is it takes exactly 2 years of on-time payments on all of your debts to go from bankruptcy to qualifying for a normal mortgage rate.

@Robert Falco, I (and many here on BP) agree with you: buy as many properties as you can qualify for, with as little deposit as allowed, while still aiming for some positive cash flow.ie.