Hi Josh! Welcome to BP!
I'm relatively new to investing in real estate myself. I've been at it around 18 months, and have two properties - a duplex and a single family home.
One of the best ways to learn is to make a plan for your first property. In making the plan, you run into many questions you have to answer. By finding out how to answer those questions, you learn a great deal of the info you'll need by the time you're ready to pull the trigger. Starting from scratch, you'll have to revise the plan many times, and may even scrap entire elements of it and rethink those. But at each iteration, you'll be learning a lot of what you'll need to know.
I started making my plan a year to 18 months before we bought our first property. I started out by asking "what can I buy something for, and what can I rent it for?"
There are way more thorough ways to mine for information, but at the time, I just jumped on hotpads and looked around my area for houses that were on sale. I found a bunch that were in a price range that didn't seem too scary, and made notes about their main attributes (number of beds, baths, etc). Then I flipped hotpads into "for rent" mode, and search for rentals in the same area and compared attributes, trying to get a fix on the ratio between prices for sale and typical rent for a similar property. As well as getting the beginnings of an idea about that ratio, I also started learning from this how that ratio changed as you went from cheaper to more expensive properties.
Having found some numbers that seemed plausible, I started trying to figure out "if I buy for x, and can rent for y, then how much money will we make?" Trying to answer that spawned a whole bunch of research that taught me a great deal. I wrote down everything that I could think of would be an expense that would have to come out of 'y'. Mortgage payments, property tax, insurance, repairs, property taxes, leasing costs, and so on. I learned a ton: what typical mortgage rates were, what downpayments were required, how to make an amortization schedule in open office calc (like excel, but free) so I could play with different down payments and interest rate assumptions, how to search the county records for property tax information, as well as gathering information about the prevailing wisdom for sensible percentages to allocate for vacancy, repairs, etc. Then I started learning about the tax treatment of those expenses, and learned a lot, including things I'd never heard of - like the fact that you get to claim 1/27.5th of your property's value (house, not land) every year as depreciation - a game changer when crunching your numbers.
I learned a lot about how to hunt for properties on the internet, and after a while I was running sims on specific properties to see how I thought they'd work. I'd gather all the information I could, then punch the numbers into a computer program I'd made that would tell me what I could expect (you could do this in a spreadsheet too w/o needing to know how to write computer programs).
After we felt relatively confident and our finances were where we needed them, we went for it with our first property. Then the real education started. There is so much you learn about what it really takes to run a little business like this when you are actually doing it. But it's like a lot of things in life, you just get as ready as you can be, make sure you have some cushion in case it doesn't go according to plan, and then go for it, knowing that you'll learn a lot more on the job.
Anyway, I've talked your ear off. I hope this helps!
