Initially, I would have recommended starting out in the short-term rental (STR) space through house-hacking.

It's just initial paperwork that the PM co handles. 

I earn much higher returns than I ever did as a rental investor, and don't have to lift a finger after the initial vetting discussion.That said, some investors really do enjoy building a side hustle business around real estate.

CA is going to be extreme and the rest of the states are likely 10-15 years behind those initiatives.

Now, I have to initiate an auction and then bid against other people just to be able to keep those properties.

When I challenged his assertion, he indicated he was referring to more than 4 units but this was conveniently left out of his initial post. 

I just built a deck at my personal residence and the permitting process wasn't terrible, but it took about 2 weeks to review my initial plans, and then another week to approve and issue the permit.

Before diving into BRRRR, try house hacking first, look into out-of-state markets, and use the profits from your initial property to fund future investments.

I am trying to reconcile actual material spend per category vs. what was initially allocated, and it's getting cumbersome going through 100s of line items.If there is a different way to go about material budget reconciliation, happy to consider that as well

Initially we registered with the FTC to get the DNC lists for the area codes we work in, but found that the CSV files were huge (over 1 million rows for just one of the area codes), far exceeding what you can do in Excel.