If not, then you will be better off in the long term paying off the loan faster and cutting down on your interest rate. 

But I seen a lot of people doing flips to pay off the rental properties faster. 

If you take less cashback, (maybe only take out a mortgage for $150,000 and pay the $10,000 interest out of pocket) then you will build equity faster, but will have less for reinvestment.

To scale faster I started looking into Commercial lending / portfolio lending.

At the end of the day, if you're negative on cash flow but still saving a ton compared to average renting this isn't a bad thing - you're still saving more cash for reserves & future investing, capitalizing on potential tax savings, getting better appreciation than many other areas, building equity faster, etc.

I get that you can potentially reach a lot higher faster by constantly utilizing leverage on your different properties equity, but getting to the place where you are mainly using cash is really appealing to me.

Maybe someday I'll have the bankroll and be ready to do a new build. 

You can break-out individual parts of the house and depreciate at a faster rate.

But they don't realize how much more money they can make if they would use agents to help them find, buy and sell properties because it makes things move so much faster that you can do more deals.

My perspective as far as being interested in this property was that it was a lower price and that I could possibly house hack and pay the loan off faster.