Lenders will use the market rents or lease rents to qualify you instead of your personal debt to income ratio.

Personal loan for the rehab.

Personally, if I was living in a hotel I'd want to move more quickly too. 

Any suggestions for a good real estate lawyer in Alabama would be appreciated.This person has a very large legal judgement against him.  

This is probably not the way you're "supposed" to used QB but I didn't want to get two softwares - one for business and one for personal.  

With that amount of equity you'd likely qualify for a HELOC on your primary residence to access that equity to buy an investment property or to buy a new primary and rent out your current home - the latter is what I do personally and all of this is what I offer my clients professionally. 

Someone recently suggested that I used a person (unknown to me but referred) to use their credit to help be refinance.

I've done several house-hacks personally with different strategies as well and have helped many clients do them in Pinellas/Hillsborough/Pasco/Manatee counties as well so if you have questions let me know and I can give you a rundown of your best options based on your preferences.If you don't want, or don't need to house-hack, then you have a couple options and that is going to depend on your goals, savings rate, and other details. 

There are definitely rougher areas in the city itself, however mostly they can be a couple of blocks more than an entire zip code so it is good to have local eyes for a potential purchase. 

Also some of my contractors did not want to bid due to parking challenges of mission beach.It came out fairly nice, but the cost was crazy and I personally did way more construction work than anticipated due to getting $crewed by 2 separate handymen.