The material is extremely high level and the reality is, it not as easily applied in every market.

2) What is a good resource for looking (and filtering) for this sort of criteria ( ie number of units and price) I’m not seeing a “number of units” filter feature on my go to - Zillow, Redfin, etc...).I figure once I know this I can calculate if the rental income will make the deal net positive ;)

Average household value in my state/area is about 750k and I would need to assume a little over 350k of the rest of the mortgage bringing the monthly payment to roughly bout 1500 which is easily doable with my income.  

If you paid cash for the home then you can easily procure a Line Of Credit from a traditional bank or from a hard money lender.

In the market that I was in, I thought I could easily get my properties to sell, especially given the cash flow.

OK...let me start with one DIY understanding...buy a real reusable respirator with bayonet mounts for a variety of attached filters and cartridges.

Being that your fairly young you could house hack in your area and change your primary residence every couple of years and only need to put low money down each time within the five years you are talking about you could easily have 3 properties under your belt as buy and holds that will help you produce that long term wealth and this is really low cost entry to build your real estate portfolio.  

The type of postcard you send doesn’t filter leads by quality.

The tenant can dispute and ACH charge just as easily. 

They have a system of PEOPLE to take on these tasks, this can be duplicated, rather easily.