Once you acquire, you start your rehab, let's say you upgrade the kitchen and it costs you $15k -- you submit your receipts to the lender to show you paid $15k for the kitchen, and they send someone out to verify the kitchen is done.

So the higher cash flow is the return on the full price of the property you paid in full for, whereas with leveraging, the lower cash flow is only in relation to how much you put down, which probably isn't much.

I am trying to acquire more properties for my portfolio, but the banks will not give me a pre-approval for a loan with any of my units vacant.

I am now questioning if my realtor has my best interest or just making sure my property rents and gets paid. 

You can find pre written forms on BP and google.

Depending on how long you plan on holding onto the the property, it may not even make sense.When I house-hacked, I just paid for the water.

You don’t want to end up in a situation where for whatever reason you fail to close, and then be accused of tortuous interference with someone else’s contract, causing the current owner to lose rental income because you paid their tenant to leave.

The insurance cost came in around $235 per month for insurance that would pay replacement cost OR the agent also offered ACV coverage which I understand to be paid out as the cost of the item at the time for $177 per month. 

I live in a 2/2 Condo that I paid $107,000 for in 2014. 

2nd piece is the house hack...We think best course of action would be to have an investor friend we know buy the house in cash, once we are done with renovations, we then take out a full mortgage on the house to cover whatever he paid for it and then pay him back with some interest.