Our team has noticed an uptick in buyer demand paired with a continued decrease in housing inventory.

House hacking is a great way to get started.

I see that you recommend NOT having my mom deed the house over to me in order to borrow against it.

I mentioned buyers brokers not showing houses to their clients because they thought the commission split was too low.

I can't give a tutorial re how to originate a note today, selling a house with financing in just one post. 

They ended up billing me $200 a month for several months before I realized what they had done.My wife's a Realtor and we flipped a couple houses that she found for us.

Once you land on the right PM, transition everything to them.As others have stated, four houses is not a big task.

I've been living in my current house hack for ~1.5, and I placed my tenants in September 2023 (lease is up at the end of August).

If you are just getting started here in Chicago, house hacking is the ideal situation.

Always use a property manager to keep your real estate investments as passive as possible and keep you compliant with Fair Housing laws.This way you can learn to manage the property manager and learn from experience as you go.If you buy a bunch of properties all at once, they may not all fit your buying criteria, there may be deferred maintenance that needs to be dealt with all at the same time, and you will not have accumulated the management experience building your portfolio one at a time.To Your Success!