At the beginning, it may be difficult to get a more expensive property that will appreciate well and so your choice is go with the cheaper property and get cash flow until you can sell and upgrade, or wait for a really good deal which you may be waiting for quite a while and its possible that you will have spent so much time waiting that you could have purchased multiple cash flowing properties by the time you get a good appreciation deal that you can qualify for / refinance after the rehab. i know anyone can go out and get seller financing deals, HML, flip to build capital or whatever the case may be I am just saying sometimes those will be harder and could result in less deals overall. 

At one point years ago, I toyed with the idea of owning giant apartment complexes in multiple cities.

Hey @Brendan Lim, what is your projected 5-year IRR (or Equity Multiple) on this investment? 

You will need to be ultra conservative on your numbers and have multiple exits.

Each grouping had a common room (perhaps it was shared by multiple groupings ... this was a detail I missed) with a nurses/aid workers office.Central to the two sides of the complex were common facilities such as a dining hall, gym {perhaps a pool ... another detail I missed}, theatre &  games room.With one of the fastest growing groups in our society being single people, we are examining a related idea of a  complex / building providing a modest-sized 1-bdroom "apartment" with more semi-private and common amenities.When I read the title to your thread, I thought it was a project proposing to mix students and seniors into a single complex ... and came in thinking, this ought to be interesting :-) 

The calculator is a LIVE excel with multiple tabs and all of them are interconnected, you may mess up a formula and you will see awesome returns inaccurately.

If the software is not simplifying your life or making you more accurate, you shouldn't use it.Software does have extremely helpful features like online payments, marketing syndication (click a button and your property is advertised on multiple sites), electronic document review/signing, maintenance tracking, and owner reports.

You can target lists through a multiple list source sites, skip trace those lists, then market to those buyers through cold calling, SMS campaigns, direct mailers, and/or door knocking; amongst other routes.

It seems like you have some very solid goals of multiple income streams, and a well calibrated risk tolerance. 

As a few have mentioned, the best way would be to call the listing agents directly, but depending on how much time you want to dedicate, setting and going on multiple appointments with different people could prove to be time-consuming.