However, passive losses can accumulate to shelter future passive gains or future capital gains when you sell the property.

You have investors that might make 300k,400k,500k a year income and simply want to park money into a higher quality asset to have equity accumulate over time.This is very different from someone making 50k a year and trying to save up 10k for a down payment to buy a dumper property to throw off higher cash flow so they can eventually quit their job and replace that income.Sometimes if people have a lot of money starting out they can skip rougher properties or SFR investing all together.

@Clayton Cook The beauty of Real Estate Investing is letting your investments grow over time to accumulate wealth which we all know.

My goal right now is to accumulate $200 million in capital through my hedge fund so that I can get greedy when the market crashes and there are deals to be found. 

We had a radiator heat pipe fail and it took the tenants months to notice the moisture accumulation.  

If these are not actual deals, then there's no point in attempting to answer this.You're missing a lot of needed info, such as what the down payments, what are the rest of the terms such as length of loan, what were the properties worth at the time of purchase, what out of pocket additional expenses were incurred over the time periods mentioned, what were the specific appreciation numbers (in dollars, not percentages) for each of the years for each property,...etc...Define what "life of the loan" means for the accumulated cash flow for the 4plex, and how much per year. 

So I'm accumulating more CA properties and OOS.However, here's the trick: if you want to purchase in Bay Area, there're still some cash-flowing market in bay area.

However, if I stayed at the school I'm at right now, I wouldn't have any debt and graduate a semester early due to my credits accumulated from high school.So as of right now, I'm considering these two options:a) Continue commuting to college (maybe major in finance to gain the essential knowledge that will help me in REI?

Even after 5 years of paying in money, the policy usually has less accumulated than you paid in.

My long-term goal currently is to buy and hold but like I said I am still just getting my feet wet and trying to absorb as much as possible.A problem I keep running across when thinking of how i will begin investing is that when I finish grad school in the next few months, I will need to start paying back some of my student loan debt i've accumulated.