My mothers family lived in brockton for years, now fall river, and maybe they put a bad taste in my mouth (god forgive me but they weren't very nice tenants to their landlords and abused the Mass system tremendously-lots of evictions).  

Whatever you decide to do, BP will help you tremendously.

I'm hardly an expert, but I've found that by building rapport and trust with our buyer's appraisers, we have been tremendously successful at getting the numbers to work.

Adding to the problem is the banks willingness in the past to loan to anybody with a heartbeat, they have regressed so far in reverse, getting a loan requires a tremendous amount of patience and documentation.For the second issue - spreads - I choose to hit singles and doubles 3 or 4 at a time to replace the homeruns I was hitting one at a time in the past.

If you go this route, one thing that has helped me tremendously is to record your meetings - you'll always have some things go over your head and you can reference back to your conversations this way and look up anything confusing or contradictory. 

This is a tremendous resource, and I am sure you will learn many amazing things here.

Your real estate knowledge from being a real estate agent should help tremendously.

This helps tremendously trying to understand how each lending option works.

I do think you should be careful within the next 1-2 years with new construction development in Bethesda as it has tremendously slowed down and the numbers just aren't being reached in certain areas anymore.  

I dove straight into the deep end and its been a tremendous learning experience.