The next day after arriving in Cleveland,  went around in a rental car to scoop out the neighborhoods.

Meet people and ask questions, find some people in the market.Look for your team:InsuranceLenderAgentProperty ManagerOnly do a deal if you have someone boots on the groundSince it seems like housing prices are pretty high right now (and the market could crash?) 

The thing with crashes is that they have symptoms.

Figure on 6 months to finish the house, if everything goes right, the contractors show up when they are supposed to, the materials arrive when they are supposed to, the weather cooperates etc and you can count on probably a year long project.

Then, I learned (made mistakes) from the housing crash but managed to keep two rental properties.

As of last year i was up to 7 rentals, but after some advice from others i sold off the 2 that were still negative cash flow purchased prior to the last housing crash when they finally broke even in value to wash my hands of them. 

So when the tech arrives, it's turnkey.

Why did you decide to do real estate from the crash and on?

When the market crashed in 2008 I jumped to the real estate side and worked as an in-house RE broker for an asset management company until 2012.

So many people are waiting for a rinse/repeat scenario of the bubble/crash from 2009, but what if that was really just a brief period of volatility in the context of the longer term uptrend, never to be repeated again in our lifetimes?