Start building a list of local  lenders (private and traditional)  contractors, handymen, realtors, wholesalers,  syndicators,..... 

Traditional mortgage with cash invested from selling a few properties out of state.

Here are a few I recommend: "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Roberto Kiyosaki; "Set for Life" by Scott Trench; "The Unofficial Guide to Real Estate Investing" by Spencer; "The BiggerPockets Ultimate Beginners Guide" found here on BP; "The Book on Rental Property Investing" by Brandon Tuner.

With 9 properties, 4 paid and 5 financed, you could clear a bunch of cash flow, pay for rent in SFo area or almost and if you buy something in SFO, you could do the home buyer jumbo loan thing and pay the mortgage with the passive income your tenants give you each month.Keep in mind that a 12plex is a commercial real estate property that does not apply for traditional residential financing and the only way to increase value is by improving the rent roll.

The traditional ROI S&P500 for that amount of money would be fairly similar after accounting for everything.

Here are a few I recommend: "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Roberto Kiyosaki; "Set for Life" by Scott Trench; "The Unofficial Guide to Real Estate Investing" by Spencer; "The BiggerPockets Ultimate Beginners Guide" found here on BP; "The Book on Rental Property Investing" by Brandon Tuner.

@Rich Solano, I wanted to provide one additional route you could look into adding on to what @Jon Taylor mentioned. 

These may be a better option as they are built for real estate so they are less generic than your traditional project management software like Monday.com 

I have been running some hypothetical use cases and been comparing the returns with more traditional investment assets, and there must be something that I'm doing wrong because it doesn't add up for me.Scenario 1 - 9.5% Yield vs Stock at 6%: 5 year 12k note with 9.5% Yield, this means 60 payments of 252.02 for an end valance of $15,121.2 which gives me an annualized return of 4.73%.

In this arrangement, instead of obtaining a traditional mortgage from a bank, you negotiate directly with the seller to finance the purchase of their property.