Single family houses are incredibly cheap.

School does an incredibly poor job of educating our kids on issues of money, so I am trying to show my kids how to avoid some of the pitfalls that I jumped into.

It's incredibly rare that this comes up, literally free money is a great problem to have, and grats!

The most common use is to sell a number of smaller assets and exchange into a larger asset that produces more cash flow, better efficiencies, etc. 

That was with 800+ credit, incredibly low debt/income ratios, high equity etc.It may have loosened up over the last 2-3 years, but I found condos to be incredibly difficult to finance.Lastly, since this is your first purchase, you should confirm that the HOA will allow you to rent out your condo. 

That's pretty incredible especially if it is in Colorado :) I do agree with your strategy.

Stay away from teams that are going to sit you in front of a phone all day and produce leads for them.

@Natalie Vane   well let me see I have owned 3 RE brokerages that were all 7 0 to 80% femalethe top producing agents in our markets are female mainly a few males but mostly female.When I was active in buying distressed assets  ( guess you can call it wholesaling)  I only worked NOD's... and my specialty was to buy them 1 to 3 days before the sale. .( we had plenty of cash we killed the no cash folks that tried to assign contracts etc.. )so I had 3 teams all mixed one male one female.. they went to the door together..

Her being a high producing RE broker I guess she likes to see what the buyers want these days...

As you can obviously tell, it's incredibly capital intensive to invest here.