Additionally, Columbus is another market worth exploring for its strong rental demand, diverse economy, and growing population.

Edgewater is decent but still a high risk roll.

Hi Joseph,As others have mentioned, given the high interest rate on the HELOC, it would be a risky play to use the HELOC as a down payment as you'd need a way to pay this back.

Once you have this team in place, you should be able to invest in any market confidently.As for picking a specific market - I would go after one with an increasing job and population growth.

Home to The Ohio State University with nearly 60,000 students, 5 Fortune 500 companies, over +25% population change since 2000, and the 2016 smart city challenge award winner (https://www.columbus.gov/smartcity/).

That is a very high income so I would definitely look to acquire some short term rentals to supercharge the cash flow.  

Your terms seem reasonable, but 10% interest might be a bit high for buyers.

Part of the reason we've been taking our time is that the costs for building materials like lumber were highly inflated at the time we purchased the property.Our primary residence, is here in the same state and we'd like to keep that home indefinitely and eventually it would be our home part of the year during retirement, rather than to sell it and move.

I highly suggest teaming up with a broker who you'd want to build a relationship with and truly understands the ins and outs of different underwriting guidelines. 

A person can be selling a property with a NOI of $100k and ask $4m, the CAP rate will reflect that their expectations are too high (for an investor at least) and all the market factors, location, comps, fed rates, will put their expectations on a leash (or justify it).