What was your top 3 biggest lessons learned?

Your biggest resource will be from people.

Meet with a local banker & schedule a time to talk with a mortgage broker, they'll give you at least a baseline of what kind of down payment options and rates are out there.After that, if you're still wanting to research more creative options, do some looking into seller financing (a very hot topic with good, and bad, advice out there), look into private lenders, and commercial financing options.If you're wanting to live in 1/4 of your quadplex, then conventional residential loans may in fact be your best option as you can purchase that with a fannie/freddy loan with very low down, and use up to 75% of the income from the property toward your own income. 

They also hide their markups3) Biggest challenge with owners & maintenance, is owners think everything "takes only 5 minutes".

We use it for private lending.

With that being said, the interest rate is going to be the single biggest determining factor for whether you're barely breaking even, or seeing a decent monthly cash flow.

I’m curious to hear from private real estate investors who’ve faced unexpected insurance claims and were protected by an umbrella insurance policy.We often see discussions whether investors should use an LLC or an umbrella insurance policy.

That’s the biggest part of the puzzle. 

With software like propstream I can even look at seller mortgage details and MLS private remark.Getting license you only know the legality aspect of being an agent but doesn't necessarily means you would be a smarter one to get to know the market.The only thing that I can not do with propstream is I can not download all disclosures when I try to purchase.

My family made theirs in real estate (house hacking a private money funded 4 family when I was little) so two different philosophies.