I'm having quite the learning experience on my first "deal". Purchased an old SFH REO for rehab and flip. I used a portfolio lender that provided a "construction" loan with interest-only during the rehab which has now converted to a 3-year note with balloon.

The rehab ended up going way over budget, and over the amount of the construction loan. Most of this overage I'm now carrying on credit cards. I had a lot of the credit card debt on 0% promo rates which are now rolling off.

House is finished now and on the market, but its not getting a lot of traction for the current asking price.  What I want to do at this point is leverage the equity of the investment property to pay off my credit card debt. I've now accepted that I may need to hold this property for several months before finding the right buyer. Also starting to explore the market to rent the property instead. In either case, I need to get some cash out to pay off the cards.

Existing Commercial Note $148K

Estimated Value $260-270K

I would like to Cash out ReFi to around $210K or around 80% LTV. I thought this would be easy enough to convert to a conventional mortgage as my W2 income should be enough to qualify for that. But my portfolio lender is saying no-go on the conventional since it is an investment property. They are willing to work with me if I rent it and start generating some revenue from the property. I'm going to have another chat Monday to see about options, but was hoping the BP community could offer some advice.

The other crummy thing is my credit score is in the dumps due to the card utilization. My DTI with the current CC payments is at 44%. My wife's DTI much less.