I love to see people from the Philly area joining (Almost everyday now it seems).I'm no expert but I'll try to tackle your questions as best as I can.1) I don't think the area should dictate your strategy or financing options.

I would suggest looking up the times and places on the Utah REIA and SLREIA's websites and going to those to figure out which niche you want to tackle. 

Do you think we should bring a contractor with us on our very first visit to the property or just go by ourselves and then decide if we even want to tackle the project.

If you do this and tackle that stident laon debt in 2 years you will have a pretty solid base both financially and knowledge wise.

Since fear has been tackled, I'll focus on failure itself.

Learned almost everything I knew to tackle my first few deals from Biggerpockets and our local REIA the Professional Investors GuildBy the time I joined HFF (2016) I had already bought 2 rentals, bought and sold 1 flip, and started on the 2nd flip.

My only thing to tackle now is building up that buyers list as well as getting better at telling someone that their 35k asking price is gonna have to come down to about 6 or 8k to do a deal with me.

It's a market for those that have a very specific focus and can do necessary the blocking and tackling. 

When the CARES Act came out, we were very straight forward with all of our tenants about this and were stern on the fact that rent still needed to be paid in full regardless, but if there were COVID-19 related issues, then we'll tackle those if they arise.

This is something your probably need to tackle on your own.