Hello BP community,

For starters, I'm extremely new to the world of real estate. Currently I'm in the process of reading books/forum discussion posts, so any book recommendations or suggestions on  particularly helpful threads to read would be much appreciated.

First off, I'm a college student in Minneapolis with 1-2 years left of my undergraduate degree remaining. for 2015-2016 I will be living in a house near the university, but once my lease is up, my mom plans on helping me to finance my own place (apartment or small house). 

My mom is actually interested in real estate too, and lately we have been talking at length about making our endeavors profitable. She lives in Michigan and will likely be putting up the majority of the capital on the property to help me get started. We've talked about investing in a small house or apartment and potentially renting it out to generate some cash flow (easy to find tenants as a university student, I'm very comfortable with roommates). In my mind, the help from my mom is a powerful asset that we can both use to get our feet wet with real estate. 

With all this in mind, I have two main questions. 

1. What would be a wise plan of attack as for acquiring a cash flow property in order to invest the returns on future rentals?

2. What does a typical property acquisition look like from idea to transaction? Meaning what are the major steps (searching for the property, evaluating whether or not it is a bargain, legal stuff, finding tenants, drawing up contracts, etc; remember, I'm brand new and basically know nothing) to making this all happen?

Thank you for your patience,

Joel