I envision this portfolio supporting me during my retirement years—though I still plan to work, just in a different capacity than I do today.I recently finished reading "How to Invest in Real Estate: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide" by Josh Dorkin and Brandon Turner, which has been incredibly helpful.

Not legal advice though ^^ I'm mostly reading and posting to learn. 

Pop into the forum just on flipping and you will get a ton of value just from reading.

You can certainly own multiple assets in the same LLC, but I would be careful about operating a business and owning other real estate or investments in that LLC.

These two statements are contradictory the way I read your comment:"the agent that provided me with the listing requires a 3% buyers commission.""

To be honest, I´m in the Maintenance & Construction for corporate businesses for some US companies in Mexico and we do some Real Estate down here also, but it´s way much different than the US, so I have much to learn from a lot of people around here and as @Julio Gonzalez, I think this is pretty much the right pad and place to start and to break my fears to start all over again from scratchAlso, I´ld like to hear more from @Justin Brickman why he voted for his city, pros and cons, it will help to read from a local...As I said before, thank you all guys for taking the time to write in this post and share some experienceDo you plan to owner occupy. $40k will not get you a non owner occupied San Diego property unless you find some unlikely alternate financing.

For the person with little to no wealth, just getting started, putting their eggs in one basket and watching it carefully makes more sense, likely up to the first $500K - $1M. 

@Shakthi Kamal read copy and paste advice below.For cashflow, you'll be looking at mostly Class C properties/tenants.Be SURE you UNDERSTAND what this means or your expectations won't match reality!

I went with Cornerstone Davis Kangas took care of the 1031 exchange.

Once you feel you've built a strong team with your first property and have solid systems in place, I would then start buying more aggressively and taking on bigger projects.I suggest reading this BP article on the core 4.https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/core-four-real-estate-team