A mentor can greatly mitigate risk and speed up the learning curve.

To mitigate risk, we decided to house hack a 3/2 home with a detached 1/1 MIL suite to rent.

The deposit should mitigate the risk.

Hi Linus, I'm located in Atlanta and can potentially help you.1) Having a good property management company should mitigate this.2) This is reasonable and you can definitely make $3,000 yearly in cashflow.

Tenant issues will arise, but you can mitigate them by being selective.  

It's those maniacs that buy homes cash via quit claim deed off of craigslist that really get screwed.Make sure your property manager is a licensed real estate brokerage.Google Clayton Morris and/or Morris Invest for a cautionary tale of what not to do when buying turnkey real estateUnderstand you can not eliminate all risk, only mitigate it.

@Jake ShulmanThere are many 2-3 flats throughout Chicago's neighborhoods but it mostly comes down to (a) where are you comfortable living and (b) your expectation for cash flow or mitigating your housing expense.

I know risk is inherent in real estate but I do want to mitigate the risk as much as possible even if that means a slow start or even a slow venture all together.

Obviously tax costs prep vary, but how large would you need to be to mitigate the potential extra cost of this work at tax time?

., through Covid most definitely had collection issues, (would love to say it didn't) but we were managing to mitigate or put tenants on payment plans as best we could.