Last piece of advice is to avoid shortcuts on the development phase in an effort to make up for the added carrying costs.  

I've been wanting to get some advice from people about my specific situation, but there's a lot so I'll try to keep it to the point;In short, I'm wanting to "officially" start my real estate investing journey, making it my source of income - and I'm wanting to do house flipping as my strategy, at least initially.  

@Tyler GilpinGo online and check the local housing authority for that city.

You can always do some hands-on work without a GC license so I would agree with the others who say that having a RE license and GC license are not worth it.Take my advice with a grain of salt since I have neither a RE license nor a GC license.

Ideally, I’d learn by doing and would appreciate the opportunity to work with a mentor to help me get started.Any advice or direction is greatly appreciated!

Readers should seek professional advice.

@Jonathan Greene Thank you very much for the great advice on finding comps.

Based on personal experience, I would add assuring the lender is specifically authorized to perform an on-sight property inspection, at the lender's discretion / convenience. 

My socials are terrible, so I am not the best one to take advice from on here but wanted to talk about how it has helped me.

Toledo's Lucas County Metropolitan Housing Authority...LMHA which administers the Section 8 program seems to have had a difficult 2016 and 2017 doesn't seem much better.I've been renting to Section 8 for seven years now, I still have my original tenant in fact, and normally I find great satisfaction in renting to good tenants and working with the bureaucracy that comes with a government program...I had 10 properties rented section 8 at one point and have slowly prioritized standard rentals over the program and now am seeing blatant issues with their operations causing me to move away from considering their tenants.Delays in the program: We used to have 5 business day's delay for new-tenant vouchers to be reviewed and processed for inspection but have been going weeks before we hear anything.