Trouble starting out REI

[Frank Spencer]

Hey BPers. I'm relatively new to REI, but have been doing reading, reading, and more reading about it. Everything from horror stories to rehabs to evictions to picking a property. For the last few months I've been looking to buy a property using an FHA. Already been pre-approved, just looking for something to get my feet wet. My plan is a 4 plex, 3.5% down, little to no rehab. Information from the MLS, sites like zillow, and the selling agent, the properties just don't cash flow. I've looked at quite a few and tried different things with all them related to the numbers. Eventually, I thought maybe the problem was in relation to the down payment. But even going from 3.5% to 20% had minimal effect. Reducing the asking price had a similar effect as well. The only things that really had a huge impact on the bottom line was typically rent in most cases, and expenses in every case. What I've found about that though is typically sellers use conservative estimates on expenses or they use their actual expenses but don't include everything. Like, I've seen people try to advertise the cap rate as a selling point, and if you do their math it does work out, but the problem is they're usually missing an expense or a few, like maintenance or vacancy will be 0. This then inflates the value but it does it in a way that isn't really helping. And then, my numbers are mostly done as a percentage of of something. So maintenance for example is a percentage of the rent, whereas I've seen multiple times people claim there is no maintenance cost and so that money is all pocket, and that just can't be true unless they're slum lords, which based on the way the properties look in pictures, they're not. Any help or advice? Im not afraid to wait, but it sometimes feels like I'm doing something wrong or I am overly cautious.