New member from southeast missouri

[Roxanne McCallister]

Hello everyone! My name is Roxanne and I live in southeast Missouri. I am a complete newbie when it comes to real estate investing. I have always had an interest in having rental properties and even doing fix and flips but I have never taken the leap to get involved in it. A friend and aspiring investor turned me on to you guys and from what I have seen it seems like a great site and resource. I listen to the podcast on my commute to and from work and love them. My goal is to learn as much as I can and hopefully have some rental properties bought by this time next year. I would like to get into rentals because of the cash flow. I would eventually like to quit my job and work in real estate investing full time. I would like to start with single family rentals then move up to multifamily units. As a newbie the one thing I keep coming back to is the market research. Everything I've read and heard mentions knowing your market, doing your research etc. My question is what all types of information do I need to be considering and where are good sources to locate this information? The area I live in is somewhat rural with several small towns. So I would like to be able to look at each town individually and I may even want to expand further out into some larger towns in the region. Any thoughts and tips would be greatly appreciated!