Buy houses that make money here and they’ll pay for your vacations :)

That presents a great opportunity, however it is hard to scale when buying everything with cash. 

You really need to buy the right kind of property in the right place.I'm not sure what you mean by type of broker.

Your tenants will pay down your mortgage and you can use some of the money from the rental to either help pay down your student loans faster or save to buy another property.

The strategy to use is to go knock on the doors of some of the foreclosure properties to see if you can buy the property before its foreclosed on

If you had to buy your first investment property again, what would you do differently?

Long term I want to buy and hold. 

Just have the balance due 5 years out with zero % interest as part of the sale.Don't buy the "business". 

I’m putting together a deal to buy a multi-family rental property from my parents in Buffalo, NY.

Many Multi-family properties now in debt service trouble as the GPs took out very risky 2-3 yr floating rate or adjustable loans so they could cash flow after buying very expensive 3Cap apartments, which loans have gone from 1.5% to 5% or higher, and knowing that obvious and predictable risk since every primate could see mega-inflation coming in early 2021 due to more money printed in 2 yrs than first 200 yrs of country, They "smartly" took out Rate Cap insurance, (cost 50k for a 12 month policy on 10mil loan to cap variable insurance rise about 1-1.5% above the origination level) but now that US 10yr up 10x from 0.31 in 3/2020 to 4.2%, that same insurance policy is 1.5-2.0 million not 50K, so They can't cover the much higher debt service nor buy new cap insurance without shutting down distributions or capital calls.