If you're not looking to invest in anything C- or lower on the neighborhood grading scale, then you can pretty much cut out anything on the East-side that is in Cleveland.

My two cents- 95% of the time, a HELOC is the best way to leverage equity and scale.

With gutters, the water shouldn't get too close to the house unless there are strong winds, the land is incorrectly graded or the downspouts are too close to the house.

They have huge efficiencies of scale building the same floor plan over and over ordering the same packages of materials.   

Here are pockets I focus on for cash flow:West side - West boulevard, Cudell, Clark-Fulton, Jefferson, Bellaire-Puritas, Old BrooklynEast side - Fairfax, Buckeye-Shaker (the north side), Waterloo Arts District, Garfield Heights, Maple Heights, Newburgh Heights, Lee-Miles (the north side), BedfordHere are the areas that I focus on for appreciation:West side - Lakewood, Edgewater, Old Brooklyn, Ohio City, Tremont (above 490)East side - Buckeye-Shaker (the north side), Waterloo Arts District, Fairfax*I have a graded neighborhood map of these areas as well if you would like to check it out.

Conversely, house hacking areas like Birmingham Alabama might be a good fit because with the lower price point, you may be able to scale faster with units.

If you don't plan to Scale this to other locations, don't learn a new business.6. 

@Joe Carpyou can buy rentals with a DSCR loan, and they will not require W2 income like a conventional bankhowever, down payments will be 15-30%, so will use up your cash fasthow to scale as we sink money into each property is definitely a major challengei have done a couple successful BRRRRs that helped preserve capitalhope this helps

It's often because people don't want to do the research or work necessary to get prepared to invest so they do things like talk about LLCs, scaling, and look online at hundreds of properties before ever seeing one in real life.The antidote is to go to real estate investing meetups, as many as you can, and never miss.

I used rental arbitrage to scale from $10k in my pocket to nine arbitrage properties in less than 2 1/2 years and then used that cash flow and profit to hire a full time operations manager, build a STR property management business with a partner and work with investors to purchase properties out of state..