First time investing in a multi-family house

[Gordon Yu]

Hi all, 

This is my first post here and this is the first time my wife and I are investing in a multi-family house. Sorry for the newbie questions:

1. Investment Thesis: My wife and I own a small e-commerce store. It costs us a couple hundred dollars a month to rent a storage unit. Our idea is that instead of paying for the rent, it'd probably make sense if we invest in a house w/ a detached garage. Our calculation is that w/ a 5% - 6% cap rate, and let's say we barely breakeven on cashflow, it would still be beneficial for us to use the garage for storage. We are trying to buy it and hold it for as long as the rent incomes make sense. So far we have seen a lot of different houses but only a handful meet that criteria. Since this is our first time investing in a multi-family house, we are not sure if there is any "blind spots" in this thesis. Is there anything we should pay attention to when buying a multi-family house in this situation?

2. Financing: The multi-family houses we are looking at are around $500k. We got a pre-approval from bank for $300. Our plan is to invest $100k cash + $100k loan from HELOC (from our primary residence; Max we can borrow is ~$200k). We have tried to get a home equity loan (i.e. so that the the loan will become 30 years instead of a short term loan) but most banks declined our application since we live in a Coop. Is there a better way to finance the investment? My concern is that HELOC is more of a short term loan and we would run into cash flow issues in the first couple years.

3. Things to look for: My wife and I have been living in COOP apartments for our entire live, and we have never live in a house before. When we are on a house tour, we don't know what things for look for and basically we just grade the house by "feeling". We spent more of the time focusing on checking the garage to see if there is electricity, how we can potentially put the shelfs and stuff like that. 

- Are the particular things that we should be looking for as an investor (rather than just rely on the "feeling")?

- Is there any books, podcasts and/or YouTube channels that you would recommend? 

Thank you!