You can, in most cases, take that 5-year appliance depreciation and more on rental properties all in the first year of ownership. 

The gel coat has to be regularly refinished and fat people can actually break it. 

I recently graduated and have been saving everything I can in order to get my first primary home.

No fat or moss growing on our butts!

If you are buying cash, there really should not be a seasoning period that you need to abide by, but you'd want to get all the work done that you have identified so that the appraisal comes back as strong as it can.  In

And that's a  fat chunk of change spent on the ceiling repair when the materials cost is 3 sheets of drywall, max-cost at $13 per, some screws, a small bucket of mud at $10, a small roll of paper tape, primer and white paint.

I have started reading/learning as much as I can in the past month.

That's a fat zero ROI for a buy and hold investments.

It's like a gym membership, just because you get a whopper on the way home and remain fat don't mean you don't gotta pay the fee.

And the market will force them to do just that (remember, places WANTED to cut their profit margin in 2020 to court more business, but they COULDN'T, now they can), in fact it's already started, hence that class action law suit against Rocket Mortgage... when they went public in August 2020, they told their investors that the 2020 profit margin was normal and projected to continue.