Educate us! Lessons learned?

[Kyle Johnson]

Good afternoon BiggerPockets community. I am a transitioning Army Officer who has been moderately successful in real estate investing doing live in flips between military destinations. As I transfer out of the military I would like to move full time into real estate investing. In doing so educating myself and looking for advice is essential for success. My "competitive" advantage to this point is the ability to do 95% of all rehab and construction work on the deals I have gotten involved in. I have done 3 deals so far, purchasing a homes comfortable enough to live in using VA loans with on average 10-15k of equity on the date of purchase due to finding opportunities in the gray area. Buying single family homes that are in too rough of condition for the none investor, but also not enough damage to do quick flips for a full time house flipper. all three deals have provided around $20-25k in returns after all expenses.

My question is as experienced investors if you were to start all over what lessons learned do you wish you knew then that you know now? Additionally, below are a few questions i would love to hear about:

1. What is your investment strategy? (Multi-family, Air B&B, Single-Family, etc.)

2. How did you get started? what do you recommend to someone getting started in your strategy?

3. What would you do different, or not again?

4. What was the one thing that really made you successful that you could duplicate regularly?

5. Did you work while you got started or go straight into full time investing? If you maintained a day job how did you scale/grow to transition to full time real estate investing?

Thank you to all that take the time to invest in my education and to those who can learn from this post. Have a great day!