-  Upside:  fastest, less expensive way to do this. 

Thanks for sharing your story Brian, i think i was hoping that my capital from my first house would accelerate this lifestyle change and make me able to speed things up a bit, maybe i need to hit the drawing board a bit.

And the fastest way is the best way.

Barely fit on my new credit cards :) my first custom leather shoes is what i remember the most.. plus things done there business wise at warp speed.. pretty cool . 

Maybe someday I'll get up to speed.

For the fastest possible scaling, it could be worth looking into flipping commercial properties (instead of flipping SFH's).

To speed it up, give them a purchase price, LTV, your credit score, current income and monthly debt, if it's a primary/investment, and number of units.

That to me has the fastest pay back. 

The benefit of having an architect as part of the team, is speed of implementation.

You can do seller financing with just the down payment and have traditional bank financing (more typical on commercial deals) the only speed bump is whether or not the BANK will allow it.