. , first off, obviously you realize there will not be any positive cashflow since you'll be occupying one of the units, decreasing gross income by at least $590/month, right?  

That could potentially decrease your monthly cashflow quite a bit.

If you work with a customer service based email marketing company, they will help you figure out ways to decrease the emails getting trapped in spam. 

If you wholesale it at $138k, the budget for rehab decreases even further.

They know that as long as CF portals are seeking to form relationships with quality Developers, the cost of funds will decrease as the industry matures - when the novelty wears off, yields on deals will decline to somewhere close to Private Money costs.  

The population here grew around .5% in the last 5 years (650k-653k).As for Real Estate, prices are beginning decrease, and some people can't sell their houses for the over-inflated prices they used to be able to sell them for.

The real deals in my opinion are going to be the homes/ multi familys that are around the foreclosures and there value will decrease a lot because of the huge amounts of foreclosures.

i see what many investors do, and they do crappy work, and other homeowners HATE them for adding to the rental scene in their neighbhorhood thus decreasing the overall value of surrounding homes.

So, you could just as accurately say that you're one rent decrease away from negative cash flow.

I would try and buy low like others have said, but wait for your mortgage to season and then take the cash out of your house so you have the reserves should something go wrong, also if the the value decreases you have the money in your pocket, and if it jumps up you can always refinance.