What they quickly discover is that virtually a single capital expenditure, a few inflated vendor invoices or a slow turn, could literally obliterate that month, quarter or year of being in the black.Likewise, PM's have to be concerned with much more than "Tenants, Toilets and Trash".

I will also take into account if I can not lease them because of economic slow down.

My team and I have been looking everywhere for property to get under contract and flip BUT things have been SLOW!

(B)  You could use a construction type of conventional mortgage and do the renovations with draws, and using a GC to do the work.  

Since it will be my first purchase I would like to start off slow, maybe start with $10,000 to $20,000 down payments for the beginning and then later scale up, and eventually get into commercial real estate multi family properties in the future.

As far as do high appeciation areas have more risk during slow downs?

I'm finding this a bit of slow process and doing a bit of fire-killing with running this but believe this is the path to take to ensure that this succeeds.  

I wonder if I should just take the sale money and hold it for a couple years and invest in a property in the mountains (or Denver) once the market slows. 

Rising interest rates should slow the appreciation value for properties. 

It's slow going.