Reducing risk requires at least some time spent in research and involvement in a deal.There are many other things you learn along the way as well. 

My wife and I thought we had an easy opportunity for a double (baseball analogy) with a flip home in Lakeland, TN we were able to get well below market this past summer.

It's that simple.Doesn't hurt to have real hardwood floors and A/C as well.

Hi Ella, welcome aboard,Your post about your real estate ambitions, encompassing the purchase, renovation, and sale of properties, as well as the ownership of Airbnb rentals, is indeed an exciting endeavor.

They work well for the houses we work in 100-500k.

Put simply, a well-designed mobile app has far higher user engagement than a web only service/site.

If they are nice enough for AirBnB, then you are probably ok there as well since the stays will be short. 

If you’ve got property and aren’t well-versed in an accounting software I’d recommend starting with a good accountant and quickly adding a good bookkeeper.

I'm fairly new in the industry as well, and most of the sources I've checked at first require a subscription (CoStar, WSJ), but I found this newsletter called Zeroflux Real Estate who consolidate real estate news from such sites.

I’ve been in a similar situation where traditional hard money lenders limited deal flow, so I had to get creative.One strategy that worked well for me was leveraging 0% interest business credit lines for 12 months, which allowed me to fund multiple deals at once without relying solely on a lender’s timeline.