prices are high, interest rates are high, there is tremendous demand for inventory by both retail / primary buyers and investors, good contractors are booked up, some materials are still expensive. ' can't we just be honest that (1) if you are in a strong financial position, then yes, RE is still a good investment and ALSO  (2) it's way more difficult than it was in 2016? 

Have sold 4 of them at a tremendous profit.  

you say that you "were told to" get an STR for tax purposes, which seems odd, and that you only have 30-40K... and you might use HELOC money to help with the down payment, which will just put tremendous pressure on you to be profitable and support all of the debt.unless i am missing something i would back up and regroup before you buy a random STR in a random market and hope it supports all the debt you will have to have...

Our brokerage has a tremendous amount of resources that would be helpful.

This comes with time and experience but a book that helped me tremendously (not really a sales book, though) was "Boundaries" by Henry Cloud.The most common challenges for RE Agents early relate to generating leads and focusing on income producing activity.I would consider spending 50-75% of your side-hustle time on income generating activities. 

Also that syndication is a whole other beast, and while there are tremendous benefits from starting a syndication, like taxes, acquisition fees, sharing the work load, etc, the risks are that much bigger.  

This experience will a tremendous value to you and your investing career!

It's still relevant, but not tremendously useful for residential properties like this which are valued by comparable sales.

I've done this, and my credit score dropped tremendously (60+ points).  

I think being by the national park in Hot Springs will help tremendously to keep the occupancy up on places.