An excellent multifamily trainer with much credibility in the market is @Gino Barbaro of Jake and Gino.

You bring up an excellent point about the trade-offs between second home and investment property loans.

.- CPA just wants a pdf or excel SS for P&L, BalanceSheet, GL - so could use whatever I want, in theory.- bank integration (download transactions) a must- no employees, so don't need payroll- if it'll bill that's awesome.

You've become part of an excellent platform for networking and education!

I then created an excel sheet with those estimates to know (a) what to offer for land to make my numbers and (b) to hold the sub to what they estimated for me.  

It’s great to have you here, and it sounds like you’re in an excellent position to start your real estate investing journey.

It's a fine line and we have easily a dozen other contractors who would give us excellent references about payment. 

The course came with PDF texts (not books) and a very lengthy excel sheet to memorize and tackle on my own.

The description and pictures are excellent marketing.   

If you have just one unit it's not too hard to keep track of payments, you can do it for free in Excel or Google Sheets, you just have to stay on top of it.