If financial independence is the objective, then the income from your rentals has to meet certain requirements:Rents and prices need to rise faster than inflation.Operating costs must stay low.

There is a method of buying a house without qualifying at a bank.

Brandon,Speaking from a Banker standpoint the most popular and cost efficient method to build your REI portfolio is a Cash Out Refinance.

Most of what you’ll rely on will be rent comps, vacancy trends, and operating costs on the specific property you’re looking at.

I get that you’ll need a cost seg study for the exact breakdown, but has anyone done this recently?

She understands creative financing and and can figure out ways to get deals done using methods most agents done even know exist. 

If a project drags past your original timeline, do you build in extra holding cost reserves, or do you try to refinance mid-project to save cash flow?

@Manish Champsee, When you did the cost seg you changed the adjusted cost basis of that property dramatically. 

What methods do they use to screen tenants?

This comes at sort of a weird time as well because we are gearing up to buy a multi-family with traditional financing and if we went with this method we would need to use the capital from that for the cash property.