I've been using the same company for five years, but the last year or so has been a steady downward spiral of bad communication, poor service, and now almost zero effort on rerents of vacant units. 

Quality of tenants?

That's a span of time you can't even fathom at your age.2)  BUILD a SOLID FINANCIAL FOUNDATIONGet your credit score to >700 (there's a ton of info on how to build your credit anywhere on BP or Google)Obtain or continue earning W-2 income (this becomes important when you want to obtain a mortgage down the line)Pay down any bad (consumer) debt and don't pile on any additional bad debt.Start saving.

Unless you're willing to live in a bad neighborhood and even then you're looking at prices around 250-300kLong Island and NJ are nice but prepare to pay 8-10k annual property taxes.

Plus, when you start to get 10 blocks away or so, you start to wonder if neighborhood conditions affect the prices (good or bad). 

The only thing about a crashed market is that it may make it more likely to find such a deal, so in actuality it may very well take until that happens for a newbie to find one, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't look for a great deal because that hasn't happened yet, and it doesn't mean that you shouldn't invest if you find one of those before a crash happens, it just means that you should NOT buy anything at any time that is NOT a great deal, or buy anything (great deal or not) that you can't realistically afford to hold through a downturn under some reasonably bad analysis stress tests.

This is not necessarily a bad thing for you.

You need to be ready to walk away from the deal if it turns out bad.

I ran into something similar with a flip that had an oil burner, and the oil soot was circulating in the house due to a bad burner.

We especially liked transforming the house into a home, and hearing the buyer compliment the quality while we were at the closing table.