Talking to people who’ve done deals in your market, both successful and unsuccessful, will give you invaluable insights and help you develop your niche.I know that’s a broad answer, but hopefully, it gives you a good starting point!

@Chris Kay to learn to properly DIY manage you have two basic options:1) Trial & fire on your own, hopefully not making a major mistake that costs you tens of thousands of dollars.- Once your time is more impotant to you then the cost of a PMC, you can hire one.2) Hire a PMC to guide you on your first rental and learn from their expertise.- You can buy additional properties and DIY manage those, perhaps leaning on the PMC for any issues you're not sure how to handle on your own.Good luck:)

I am hoping we can learn some things here about how to scale.  

Hope this clears it up! 

Hope you didn't pay anything to an S8 "guru"!

I hope to use private capital to fund the entry fees in second position.  

Readers should seek professional advice.

Hope this helps for now, and great to hear you are paying attention to your hard earned retirement funds with such care and discipline! 

I hope things go better for you in the future. 

Hopefully you learn that RE can be a weakth creator even if this is more of a learning property.