Here are a few reasons:Unless you already know the area you're buying in, you have to learn the neighborhood You have to scour the MLS, or whichever method you're using, to find properties that fit your requirementsYou have to do comps for purchase price and for rental price for each property you're consideringYou have to estimate initial costs to acquire the property (as you're already trying to do) as well as monthly expenses -- we built a model over time to do this and BP also has a calculator you can use to help with your first dealWhen all is done and you go through inspections, appraisal, and closing, the work of being a rental property investor is just beginning.

Scour the internet for reviews (much overhead goes into hiding them these days.)

My partners and I are scouring our contacts and networking to piece together verbal capital investments for POF in order to submit LOI’s.  

After using the lovely BP calculators, and scouring multiple sites for comp rents, zillow, mls, rentometer I've concluded the avg. rent for a 3 bdr 1 bath to be between $1400-$1550 depending on the neighboorhood which is decent.

Make sure you scour the multifamily threads for information and whenever you have a specific question about MF, don't hesitate to create a new thread (assuming one hasn't already been created) and DM the active MF forum posters.

First time poster (and buyer), scoured the forums but couldn't quite find someone with my situation I could refer to.

Are you scouring craigslist for this information??

I have been scouring realtor.com to keep up with housing trends and things seem to be taking a slight down turn right now. 

I would suggest you start by scouring every topic, article, book and subject you can to learn from the fine folks here and everywhere else, but don't be too gung ho and go out and buy something because you want to get into it. 

You can create lists by scouring online databases, free data, or when you're through playing around, spend money on commercially-provided lists.