The Snowball- Strategic and Smart or Stupid and Slow?

[Michael Landrum]

I am very new to the real estate world, but I have been consuming anything and every bit of content I can get my hands on. At this point, with a pretty good awareness of my (tiny) local market, I know with certainty that I want to buy and hold rentals long-term. In an effort to keep this brief, I'll just get right to my strategy idea. What I want to do is pay off the first house I have (which was my primary residence, until I placed renters in there just 3 days ago) as fast as possible. At that point, I would be completely maximizing the cash-flow on that property which I would use to make extra principle payments on the next property to help pay off that property as fast as possible. At that point, I would own 2 rentals free and clear, therefore having maximum cash-flow from both of those properties that could be used to purchase the next property even faster, while maybe even being able to pocket some of the cash. I would just continue this process over and over which would increase the cash-flow that can go toward more properties, as well as pocket-cash. 

Now, one clarifying point:

1) I don't necessarily mean that I would only control one property at a time. I would be willing to own a couple properties in the beginning, but if I was to control multiple properties, the goal would still to be to pay off the property with the least debt as fast as possible so that I could turn around and use that cash-flow to pay off another property and so forth. 

Advantages that I see:

The snowball effect that would result from owning more and more properties free and clear which makes it easier to buy more and more maximum cash-flow properties as you go along.

Absolute maximum cash-flow from each property much quicker than waiting the full 30-years for tenants to pay-off your mortgages.

Disadvantages that I see: 

Difficulty rapidly paying off the first 1 or 2 properties.

Untapped equity in all of the free and clear properties.

Here's my questions (in addition to any other comments anyone would like to offer):

Is this a good idea? 

Are there any resources on a strategy like this?

What are some clever ways to pay off those first couple of properties?