However, a credit repair expert that I have worked with for a few years told me that if a borrower gets a similar inquiries (all mortgage inquiries) in a short period of time (2-3 weeks) that it will not negatively affect your scores.

I assume you are thinking you can borrow the down payment and couple that with a more traditional/conventional type loan? 

There would be (again, depending on purchase price) be no PMI with your down payment size as a % base ‘offset’ to the loan size and you might be able to take a smaller ‘as it’ property and use these borrowed funds for rehabbing to more of your end user needs.

They usually look more at the deal than the borrower. 

Even if you aren't borrowing on the line of credit, it may affect your ability to secure a loan for buying real estate.Hope this helped...Doug

For the sake of the rest of the post I will refer to it as a CFD.The tenant/borrower can obtain an insurance policy which will look similar to a renters policy.

IF you are borrowing funds, you also get to take deductions for some of the interest and depreciation related to the percentage of value that is financed.Just my .02 :-)Dan Dietz

I'm looking at a few properties in my area and I'm considering on buying cash and borrowing against the property to do reno work.

As far as the suburbs I don't know how comfortable i would be borrowing 200k+ for a decent single family home while still having some money left over for reserves.

that's easy  mortgages double in some case .. and they were sub prime borrowers and a huge amount were minority don't understand what they signed... and walked. ergo there is NO sub prime any more.. and this is why home ownership is so low in areas that are heavy to minorities ... and those areas have turned into rental areas with landlords from out of state.