My advice would be to start small with your first deals to gain experience before scaling up.

I'm a newbie tooSelf education through books is a conversation between the author (mentor) and you.You'll gain knowledge, connections etc but it takes timeAttending meetups, listening to Youtube videos on subject matter further broadens knowledge base

I would love to benefit from the savings of grouping the listings as a primary with add-ons, but the last time I tried that, there were multiple issues on their end.

I’m in CA also and paid cap gains on huge profits to the tune of 28%, which included CA state cap gains.

Real estate investing has been a passion of mine for time with my mother also having invested early on where I likely have gotten the love and desire to follow similar foot steps.I have taken last 6 months to educate myself and currently own a single family home as primary residence and would like to expand to multi family properties (2-4 units) for additional stream of income, not to mention potential tax benefits for long-term investing.Based on current living situation, I have a fair amount of equity established in my primary residency along with having enough cash to either pay off house completely or use towards investing in a multi family property.Given that I'm the sole source of income for our household with my wife being the home maker for our two kids under 2, trying to weigh out risks with getting started now or perhaps waiting. 

Live-in-flip a four plex- live in one unit while you rent the others and benefit from the other 3 units paying a large chunk if not all of the mortgage.

My hope is I can gain their trust as a property manager and eventually be the one they turn to to sell later on or refer for business in the future.

Where is the benefit to the end buyer here? 

Sometimes 5 in the case of 9% LIHTC deals but all the way up to 15 as I’ve seen in 4% deals.  9% is competitive meaning there’s only a certain amount of projects awarded each year by your states HCR.  4% is not competitive and is usually more appropriate for large projects because 9% will get allocated to projects of smaller size so as to spread the benefit.  

You mentioned "The only problem is that these are 6 month lends, I'm 1.5 months into this, so any work that I do now will not reap any kind of benefits until 6 months from now."