A public insurance adjuster works on your behalf to dig into these details and get you a larger payout.

You sort of answered this in your post though, where you mention keeping the cashflow for myself, and I don't think it's a great idea to charge an upfront fee for these deals.

But I feel when booking all sorts of things that unanswered bad reviews feel like confessions from the seller/owner/etc. that the review is correct.Some landlords and sellers hire companies to threaten to sue people who leave bad reviews if they can't back up their assertions.

If that's the case, see if your parents or another relative would be willing to cosign on this first house to get you started.You can also look for an owner-financed deal, but they are harder to find and they typically want a larger amount up front.

Or does it need to be one in larger cities?

They might work for smaller mom-and-pop units (2-8 units), but not for anything larger.Most owners of larger, more established multi-family properties don’t fall into the category of distressed landlords that off-market strategies usually target.

Housing prices in two of our larger cities (Vancouver and Toronto) are also crazy high (eg $1M to buy a starter home)...actually in Vancouver proper at the moment the cheapest home (single family, not strata) is $1.2M...surprisingly (to me) in Toronto the cheapest home on the market is $650K (ignoring some listed for $1 as clearly there is a catch).Our mortgages work differently than in the US, and what we get for rates are only locked in for 1-5 years (typically) and then we have to renew at whatever the current rates are. 

I suppose it could be a first time in history sort of thing but as far as statistics go the market has always recovered and always went up further than ever before.

I own/operate over 150 units in Pittsburgh and you can find every sort of real estate investment play here.

To support some of the challenges some residents may have that feel they conserve while others don't, you can also take the # of occupants and the square footage and come out w/a higher ratio for larger units w/more people.