I am a home owner with a little bit of equity.

Most Boris facing imminent foreclosure what happily take 10 or 20 thousand walk away and I'm speaking of the ones with a lot of equity in their property already and yet they're fixing to lose it for different reasons.

There are partnerships of labor for equity but it is hard for the person providing labor to provide enough value to make it worthwhile for the person providing money.

For many years I have worked on improving and selling primary residences and rolling over the equity to the next home but I would like to get into real estate investing as a business.

So my wife and I are trying to figure out how to solve our residential housing puzzle...We're currently in a $550K house with approx $200K in equity...House is too big and we'd like to downsize to about a $350K home...problem we've run into is that I lost my job at the end of last year (and am now focussing on our fledgling RE business) along with a 6 figure income - we also own two SFR rentals.

Plus...escape velocity...Episode 113 – Jay Papasan - Very practical slow and steady adviceEpisode 221 - Tim Shiner - his concept of equity build up and "shearing the sheep" shows some of the flexibility of real estate vs a 401k Last but not least, I also recommend all the tax advice given by my fellow CPAs on the BP Podcast.

Seller Financed or something like that)Right now you have no track record, which means you can't even work with a hard money lender, unless you find a smoking hot deal with enough built in equity to satisfy the need for a down payment. 

That way, after the investor puts $50K into renovating the property, he still has $150K in equity.

@Alexander Wardell  First thing you should do is to familiarize yourself with MA landlord/tenant laws - which are biased WILDLY in favor of tenants.Next, learn about Fair Housing. 

However taking out all the equity and leveraging to the max is riskier than not doing so.