In a market that is active you will have 5 to 10 players that will buy 90% of anything that comes up that is remotely a deal..

Network/market yourself.  

As far as upgrades, it's going to depend on who your target market is. 

I would buy a place all cash if was an option but the best part of the refinance is that you can use the current equity and the potential new rental income to purchase.I can't cash out refinance right now.One of my properties doesn't have enough equity; I'm probably at 19%-21% LTV - 15% down house hack.The other property has probably $80-90k I could tap into, but I have a 2.9% loan, and I won't even break even with the new interest rate.You have a great rate so it's probably hard to beat that but based on what I am seeing in the market rates won't go down to that for a very long time (if ever again).

Repeat.Find a market that supports my 100k budget?

I can also see how many times I chose to market to a given property because I'll add a tag each time.

I'm in the Bloomington-Indianapolis market.

My advice is for you to determine your strategy and choose the market where you plan to invest.

I was excited to get into the market, but I soon realized that I had much to learn.Key Lesson #1: Start Investing Early I wish I had started investing in real estate sooner.

Our neighbor told us they plan to sell their house and we are interested in purchasing it. We would either keep it as a cash-flowing rental property or fix it up and move in to it and rent our house. We would even con...