If you only ever plan to do this twice, is it still BRRRR?

Somebody asked me this at a meetup and I gave a bad answer, so I'm putting it here.

The letters are buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat. The last R is the engine. You pull your money back out at the refinance and use it to buy the next one, which is how people go from one house to eight without new savings.

But plenty of people here, me included, aren't trying to get to eight. Two or three good rentals, held a long time, is the whole plan. If that's you, the refinance is no longer about funding the next purchase. It's about whether you want to convert your short-term rehab loan into a long-term loan, and how much of your own cash you'd like back while you do it.

So one camp says without the repeat you're just buying a fixer, renovating it, and holding it, which has been a thing forever and doesn't need a name. The other camp says the discipline of the method is the useful part regardless of how many times you run it, because it forces you to underwrite the rent and the refinance before you buy.

I lean one way but I've been talked out of it before.