Until I realized I need to utilize my creativity, ingenuity, number crunching forte, ability to sell and impeccable customer service skills.  

Find all transactions that were over $10 in the past 3 months and crunch the numbers on those.

Again, being creative allows more ways to try and make things pencil out, but it doesn't change the basic tenets of purchasing price, borrowing costs, etc etc etc.Those are all just sums of math that you would need to crunch for any scenario.

I took a class in financial modeling, but was curious to see what people were using to crunch numbers?

This action consisted of searching out a mentor who is helping me tremendously right now (advertising, networking, and crunching numbers.)

At least you have the terminology and can crunch numbers and understand various financing options.

There is equity in the deal, i guess i am looking for way to make cash flow while the housing crunch works itself out and then sell them off again.

Over the past 4 months I have been crunching numbers on a lot of deals in local suburbs.

For the investment home, given our income and savings, we could simply purchase a duplex out in Long Island, which, in a lower class neighborhood, could be had for $300k-$400k, and rent out for $4-$5k a month total.Or, on the much cheaper end of the spectrum, I've been looking MFHs in Northeastern Pennsylvania, that go for under $100k and rent out for about $1k-$1.5k total (the best of these properties that I've crunched the numbers on cashflow at about $500-$600 a month, after PITI and property mgmt fees, but before any CapEx).Obviously I like the cash flow numbers on the more expensive homes here, but since we're looking at buying a home for ourselves in the next couple of years, I'm not wild about having that much capital tied up.  

But it forced me to stop working in my business and be extra cautious when crunching the numbers.