It's a different culture here. 

This practice of renting by the room is very common in college towns; you can probably get some good ideas from the websites of these type of rentals, including rules, applications, & leases.  

Read all that you can, but also put what you are gaining into practice.

A few practical things you can do in your situation to build your credit and start investing might be to get a CD secured loan at a credit union or bank.  

It takes practice and many years of experience to perfect the process.

Practical question: it's easy enough to figure out what cap rate the seller is using to determine their price (if they don't state it outright.)

This is made possible by dumping my entire income as a realtor into our investments, as we are currently living on one income and will continue that practice. 

A very simple way to start might be one of those websites that give you cost per daft estimates for different repairs.It sounds like you are in the learning phase, so do lots of reading and maybe see if you can find some properties to evaluate for practice.

If one were to crunch numbers and stick to just the official city boundaries, they'd absolutely be missing out on quite a large amount of relevant data.My comment was more directed in a practical manner re Miami.  

What is standard practice?