New to Investing w/ $100+ to Invest - SFR, MF or Apartments

[Kasey Libby]

I have never invested in real estate. At the end of the year, I will have in excess of $100,000 in cash available to invest. I have a wife and two boys (6 and 4). I own a home and have a $250,000 HELOC in place with zero balance. My wife and I are self-employed, make between $200K-$300K in earned income and some unearned ordinary income, and have a good bit tucked away in our SEP and traditional IRAs and plan to continue to put money in them in subsequent years. We both are working full time for that income. I am an attorney, and she is in marketing. We both can continue our careers making a good bit of income every year so long as we are healthy. Our personal expenses are pretty high right now as a result of raising two boys, and we expect those expenses to remain pretty high for quite awhile.

We both are on the same page about investing our extra cash in real estate but we are not sure which direction to go. Originally, we thought we should by some SFRs since we would have down payments for 4-5 in hand. However, I am interested in making more income in the near future, enough to give my wife and I flexibility with respect to our regular jobs, than I believe SFRs will provide. On the other end, I think we have enough for a down payment on something that would produce more regular income such as an apartment building or complex but feel like we might be too green to do that on our first bite at the real estate investing apple. If it produced enough income, our plan would be to reduce our regular job hours (the benefit of being self-employed) so we could put in the time on the RE biz, and possibly get a management company to help. However much I'd like to get out from under the necessity of lawyering, I make a pretty good hourly rate and probably would be able to make more by billing legal fees and hiring a management company to handle the apartment than cutting my lawyering hours in half to put more focus on the RE biz.

Maybe investing in smaller multi-family would be a good compromise.

Any advice and recommendations would be greatly appreciated. I've got a pretty good sense of how SFRs would be. The diversification aspect of that versus putting everything in one apartment building investment is appealing, but I am attracted to the income potential of apartments. 

Any of you start out buying an apartment building or complex? If so, what was your experience?