My wife and I had similar nerves before we bought our first STR.There will certainly be times where your inexperience may leave you overwhelmed but the good news is you have a great community here at BiggerPockets willing to help you out with any issues that may come up.

Another thing to keep in mind is that some of these South ATL suburbs can dip into that C-/D range, which for an inexperience investor, could lead to disaster.

This may just be inexperience on my part but the thought of getting multiple loans in a 6month period to satisfy the 1031 requirements seems daunting.

Was it location, property type, class, age of the property, your experience/inexperience at the time, etc? 

It sounds like the seller senses inexperience and is testing to see how high you will go. 

With Coronavirus, coupled with my inexperience, I couldn’t get any private or hard money loans so I had to save up my own cash.

Given inexperience with these deal types, how do you truly know it's a good deal?

There is insight in experience, how did you start?

My story is probably a worse case scenario and due in part to inexperience, but remember that unscrupulous sellers could hide all kinds of things from you and if you aren't prepared you could step in something that's pretty hard to get off your shoe.

But, you are spot on about my inexperience.