Improve primary home to get a larger equity line for investing?

[Deacon H.]

I'm starting out looking to get into multi-families and larger apartment complexes. 

I have some cash which could get me into  some 2 or 3 families but if I had more cash I could get into some 10-15 unit apartment complexes.

I'll use nice round numbers because it's easier.

Let's say I have 100k cash.

I have the ugliest house on my street...and live on a very nice street and in a nice area.

Houses around me sell for 600k. 

I bought mine for 350k and put 50k into it when I purchased it. It's likely worth 475k now.

I'm toying with the idea of putting anywhere from 50k-100k into the property 

My target would be to get the house to an appraised value of 650k which would give me about 350k in equity

I would then take as much of that 350k as possible via an equity line and buy a larger apartment complex than I could otherwise afford with my 100k cash.

Is this a horrible idea? My assumption is with the larger apartment complex is that I could cashflow better than with a smaller multi-family and would be able to service my equity line debt. 

I guess the 2 options look like:

* 100k cash + equity line of 175k

* renovate my house and have 0 cash available for investment + equity line of 350k

[Jaysen Medhurst]

@Deacon H., yes, it's a terrible idea to plow your cash into your house in the hopes of increasing its value and using the equity. It is very unlikely that you will even see a dollar-for-dollar increase in value let alone nearly 2X.

Use the cash you have on hand, plus the equity you can pull out of your home for now and use that to get started with multi-family.