These I have found are real, striving parents, working their butts off to provide the best housing and school system for their children.My ethos in this approach is exactly why we at LaPlante refer to them as Residents, as we consider "Tenant and Landlord" to be dated terms and rife with negative emotion.

The key is building systems and finding solid property management to handle things while you move around.

Once you feel you've built a strong team with your first property and have solid systems in place, I would then start buying more aggressively and taking on bigger projects.I suggest reading this BP article on the core 4.https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/core-four-real-estate-team

While sophistication of your equity partners (private money lenders) will vary between residential and commercial, the principle of raising private capital is the same.You need to develop your own system which allows a constant stream of PML even when you don't need the funds and/or don't have an active deal under contract.For example; I raise private capital by offering free educational workshops for people with self-directed IRAs.

If you want to scale then you’ll need systems and processes so that you don’t feel so overwhelmed.

At every foreclosure auction you will find the same cast of characters who know the system.

FCI is big (160 employees) and their portal may seem like overkill, but they have their systems down and they are responsive.

Building out the systems to continue to track inputs is exciting. 

Your first hire is unlikely to work out though, was you won't have a good hiring system in place. - So, recommend having that first hire document the crap out of what you want them to do.

A third party company that integrates with our system.