I am sorry that the storm that passed through just prior to your stay required emergency roof repairs. 

My piece of advice would be to research emerging neighborhoods and focus on areas with strong job growth and infrastructure development. 

And you'd be available for emergencies if the business needed you (with nice overtime pay).    

Surprisingly, he said he would fix it for free for us.

Focus on analyzing properties and starting small, like house hacking or buying a single-family home to rent out rooms, while ensuring cash flow and maintaining an emergency fund.

Once it is operating, it doesn't require a ton of time, save & except when you have an emergency come up.

It's a competitive market and most of the people that get in trouble here are ones that buy blindly without actually figuring out the numbers, etc.You'd be surprised the number of times I get asked after month one if their electric bill of $xxx or whatever is normal, and the thought running through my head is "how did you not  check things like that before you committed half a million dollars to something?"

Just make sure to fully understand the loan terms, especially the interest rate and repayment schedule, so there are no surprises.2.Condition of the Property: If the property isn’t in really rough shape and you were able to get insurance on it using a 4-point inspection and wind mitigation, you might even qualify for traditional funding options like FHA, Conventinal, VA, a cash-out refinance or a home equity line of credit (HELOC).

I would also advise doing your own inspection of the property to make sure that everything that they say is being done is actually completed and to code and that there shouldn't be any surprise maintenance costs at the beginning.  

What was really surprising was how expensive materials were.