That is just normal not saturated in those cities, lot of blue collar. 

The breakeven point for solar is normally 10 - 15 years.

This emphasis on scaling as quickly as possibly means you’re going to become a door chaser and you will look for markets that cater to that objective which normally means weak underlying fundamentals.   

Putting that much down with a normalized interest rate I assume the cash flow is there. 

At this point, we are three years in, and have learned that you sometimes have to have thick skin (grit) in dealing with tenants, managers, and RV site visitors; while maintaining a sense of humor and humility.

Everything is talking about the regular "get a mortgage buy a house wait for market to drop wait for rates to go down" which is totally fine and normal (and mostly how I make money as a realtor) but there are way more ways to buy than just that route!!

If you still have those properties and mortgages 10 years from now, rents will likely be much higher, and the value of the cash you are using to pay the mortgages will be much lower even assuming normal 2-3% a year inflation.

Is this normal for this type of loan?

That's not going to stop me, I'm currently building a team over in Birmingham to get my portfolio started, but I wanted to get some advice about how the out of state buying process normally works.

There is still very high demand in many markets with rates coming down and lower than normal inventory..