They are out there, just need to work with the regional lenders versus national in most cases.As to the OPs question, I was successful in borrowing on a legal 5 unit property that the bank treated as a 4 unit for lending owner occupied, but it took me nearly 6 months to close the loan after jumping through hoops.

The borrower filed for a homestead exemption for property taxes and even though she had another homestead exemption on another property that she claimed as her principal residence--she was obviously making at least one false statement--we had to treat her as an owner occupant when we foreclosed. 

if you borrow 400k at 5% with a 20 year am your payment would come in @ 2.639k  leaving you a cash flow of roughly $900 a month.If you forgo the 1031, eat that tax and and invest the 250k you should be able to get a 4 plex, rented at 550 per unit yielding 2.2k in gross rents netting 1.1k (using the 50% rule) but you don't have all the other units rented out and tenants paying the mortgage for you building equity.Note these are rough numbers but my wife recently helped a client buy a 8 plex here in PHX and the buyer looked at a lot of properties over an extended period before finding one that worked  for them.  

I would absolutely pay off any borrowed money once the flip sold, or the buy and hold was refinanced.

Fortunately Canadians are smart enough not to make RICO level mortgage origination fraud legal (unlike your southern neighbors here in the US) so a collapse brought on by mortgage rates resetting on borrowers who had no business getting a mortgage in the first place is very unlikely.On the other hand with mortgage rates below 3% and most Canadian mortgages being short term (compared to a 30 year in the US at least) if rates rose significantly a lot of folks might have a hard time affording the new payment when the loan was due to roll over.

@Patricia Gemming 203k is a FHA rehab loan, where you borrow money to buy a property that needs some work and also borrow money to get the work done by licensed contractors.

You are going to have to share the paper with a mortgage banker if you truly want to know how much you can borrow and look at the various options available to you.Upen Patel, Mortgage BankerFederal NMLS# 1374243

I didn't see any glaring errors in those numbers - except for me, 6% cash-on-cash return on a $50k outlay would not tempt me to borrow the extra $150k for this deal (unless there was something else about it eg. severely undervalued compared to what rents COULD be).

I know the different types of investing and have chosen my niche, which is of course (wholesaling), being the reason of choice strictly from financial lacking.

Why isn't this just like a slow flipPeople borrow hard money to renovate to flip.