Hey BP Network!I'm a graduating Senior in college set to start as a Financial Analyst in January of 2018. My goal is to have my first investment property by Summer 2018 in Greenville, NC. My question is how necessary ...

As a newbie I'm trying to allocate current assets into a plan to grow rapidly and trade up into Commercial Apartments. 

I'm just a newbie to this who is getting out of the Army in a few months!

They can help you navigate through the process and inform you of all your options.Seth gave a wonderful answer, but I just wanted to expand a bit in case any newbies (like me!)

I have about $200k equity tied up in my current home and just over $50k for investing now.  Knowing what I know now, I would not have put such a large downpayment on a low 2.75% interest (15 year fixed) mortgage loan ...

I am such a newbie that I do not know of other "venues" to buy from

Time is worth something, time is more valuable than money, it is just one of those things that we all know but for some reason newbies ignore too. 

Bank financing with a construction loan - harder to get for a newbie, but doable depending on your situation.

The only thing about a crashed market is that it may make it more likely to find such a deal, so in actuality it may very well take until that happens for a newbie to find one, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't look for a great deal because that hasn't happened yet, and it doesn't mean that you shouldn't invest if you find one of those before a crash happens, it just means that you should NOT buy anything at any time that is NOT a great deal, or buy anything (great deal or not) that you can't realistically afford to hold through a downturn under some reasonably bad analysis stress tests.

Fort Worth newbie here too!