Great start on investing!

It depends on your financial strength, the quality of the property, how many properties you own, etc.I like to start with one significant expense and three months of vacancy.

I am considering getting into this space (looking at some courses), but worried that its too late, and that deep local market knowledge/understanding of buyers/connection with developers etc is required to make this work, which only incumbent/long term investors will have and would be hard for a new entrant starting from scratch to catch-up...is my hypothesis valid in your opinion ?

I started listing the homes one by one as they became vacant, and we were doing okay with getting them sold - in 2012, that was no small task.Jeff called me one day and asked me for CMAs on the next few properties that would be coming up.

., (3) gives you viable options and explains the pros and cons of each option and (4) you enjoy interacting with - this should be a relationship, not a transaction.Once you find a few lenders like this (and you should have relationships with more than one), then you can start comparing rates and fees.

As we continued to scale, we eventually added a positions to start taking some of my wife's responsibilities. 

@Albert Gallucci as many have pointed out, in the commercial space of 100+ apartment buildings and offices, property classes have some pretty decent industry standards.We started applying these to 1-4 unit properties around 10 years ago, which you can verify on our blogs, because we saw too many newbie investors not properly taking into account things like, neighborhood status, tenant pool, property condition, etc.Unfortunately, there's no industry standard for this, but you can use some basic logic to think your way through your own Classifications.

But would recommend you start with Long Term Rentals first.

When one machine goes down you start losing money in a small way. 

But neither do you, yet you started with:"Short answer is "yes"  - which I consider misleading.And you manipulated the OP's question to fit your agenda.