I will keep trying, but it's good to be able to narrow the focus since it seems like the situation for non-QM loans is not lender-specific. 

Select sold and narrow it down to properties that have sold in the past 180 days. 

(assuming they acted correctly in the eyes of the law)A police report was obtained, and it did shed a very narrow beam of light on the manner.

I don't narrow the list down after I've already purchased it. 

Purchased from another investor who didn't have time to deal with the narrow margin and keeping tight control of costs to make it work.

If you are staying in a specific, fairly narrow market, you are essentially always analyzing all deals.  

I began with knowledge of general real estate so I kind of have an idea of what each piece does, now I am doing more narrow focused research based on what niche I want to enter.

I'm really loving being a part of this community and thank you in advance for your perspective.I have made some good Excel sheets for finding deals that will work, and have a good idea of what I can do on the lending side, so now I'm looking into next steps.I feel I need to narrow my net before talking to a realtor, so how would you suggest I decide between multi and single family?

Once you know what you can afford, narrow down the neighborhoods you are interested in.

Using the filter function you can start deleting undesirable properties based on the numbers to get the list down to a manageable size.If there is no value in the building column then you are likely looking at vacant land.There should be a code in one column that tells you if a property is a house, mobile home lot, multifamily, store etc.I spend a lot of time narrowing down my list, then I look up what they look like online to eliminate more, then I drive by every property that I might bid on.I do this myself, I don't trust a VA for this work as I am spending a bunch of money and one mistake on a property could cost many thousands of dollars.