Again, I used my parents but this time only as lenders of part of the money for the down payment.

If you have this debt and need money, you may not be preparing yourself for the challenges of being a landlord.

Purchase price: $130,000 Cash invested: $9,000 Sale price: $185,000 I did not have the knowledge then to keep the property and pull money out to complete renovations to another property we purchased a year after this one that required a complete overhaul.

You might consider hard money for the initial purchase or going with a DSCR type lender if you find something that is more turnkey.Hey!

Beyond real estate investing, BiggerPockets Money has great episodes on how to avoid the middle class trap with your investments - ie how to structure your investment best so that they're not all locked up in accounts with penalties until you're 65. 

I agree that with one property you can just use OTA pricing tools.  5 mins a day for adjusting and you will save money and do it yourself.

No, they don't want us to lose money, they just want to make sure we make no money!

I spent a lot of time and money to learn how to structure seller financing deals.

Each one with separate addresses and utilities.We originally put $585k of our own money into the project, and by the time we were ready to go to market in 2023 we were into it for about $2M (the pandemic really threw a wrench in our timeline and costs but also greatly increased the value).

If not I wouldn't bother selling as there is an incredible amount of money lost in buying and selling properties, so you have to make sure you have a plan to maximize the equity and actually have enough.