Provided you do not say the feeling was you would be murdered in your sleep because the applicant was a convicted murderer.Bottom line is you can discriminate to protect your business interests provided you have an alternate  primary reason for rejecting the applicant.

I mean this is bigger pockets and the primary topic of conversation here is SFR investments... then we all grow up and buy apartments and shoppimg centers.

My primary interests revolve around buy-and-hold and possibly flipping.  

My former primary residence prior to working overseas (unplanned rental that is underwater) and my first actual investment property purchased in December 2015.

TonyHi Tony, The majority of the down payment came from our HELOC from our primary house plus we saved all of the cash flow from #1 with our little savings and the remainder came from another loc.

If you've got the money for the down payment, then the difference in rates for investor vs. primary resident is a small cost of the overall investment, assuming you're not able to find something in your area. 

My primary target is construction that I can sell at an affordable rate in the future or something that I can rent out.  

You can insure entity owned (LLC / INC) properties on their personal lines so long as you are the managing member, it would need to be insured with the individual as the primary and the entity as an additional insured.

For my wife and I, we don't have the income to qualify for this kind of mortgage (we have a mortgage on our primary residence now), and knowing how much we'd need to come up with for the initial investment and knowing it would take some time to get the occupancy up to where we want it, it seems risky to use hard money or some funding with a higher interest rate.I would like to make this happen at some point though because there seems to be high upside and this market doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon - at least not in this area.

I would say it is great to get the VA loan to buy your primary residence.