@Robert Gibbs welcome, and good luck on your investing journey.
My two cents: a house hack (which can be a single fam or small multifam property) is the best way to start off--and is a far better strategy for a beginner than an OOS property.
A good house hack will simultaneously lower your living expenses while increasing your income (the fundamental recipe for building wealth), it will teach you many of the essential skills you'll need to succeed in REI (like due diligence, tenant screening, property management, etc.), and--importantly--it's MUCH simpler and easier than other strategies like OOS investing (which tends to have a lot more risk and a much steeper learning curve).
Unfortunately, we regularly see beginner investors on the forums with nightmare scenario properties (non-paying tenants, crime, property destruction, and MIA PMs), and their story is almost always the same: it was their first property, and they bought OOS because the cashflow was great (on paper), and "it looked great in the photos", but the property was a lipsticked pig rehab in a C or D neighborhood, and they learned the hard way that PMs have no incentive to put in the significant effort required to manage in a C or D area for the minimal revenue such a property produces....that's a lesson I'm glad I haven't had to learn through experience!
Fortunately, there are simpler, easier REI strategies (like house hacking) that have lower risk profiles.
Good luck out there!
