Rentals create cash flow, and that's what we want as real estate investors, but you need cash on hand for unforeseen circumstances.The AC needs to be replaced, that's $7K to $10K or more depending on the size of the house and if you have one rental, it will eat all your cash flow, same to replace a roof, etc, or if tenant trash the home, you need money to fix it again.To me personally a nice rental portfolio that is healthy consists about 10 units, so if you have an issue with a house the portfolio can cover the repairs and still healthy, but when starting you need to have cash on hand just in caseYes, there are multiple strategies you can use to hack your way to buy your first rental with minimum cash, but I would start wholesaling or fix and flip a few deals to create that cash as fast as possible

Their platform is robust enough for all basic landlord/tenant needs—rental advertising, screening, applications, rental payment, document storage, maintenance requests, etc.

Purpose of the investment is  positive cash flow.

I've got maybe 20k in cash.

You need to find that someone and negotiate payment for the lien release.

Not only is the return not there, if you don’t pay cash for the system you can kill the sale of your property.

I would just use rentredi to screen tenants and collect rent payments. 

Most of our housing stock is 60 to 120 years old and requires a lot of capex, especially the bottom of the barrel properties are typically fools gold, because capex will exceed cash flow over a few years.

Purchase price: $140,000 Cash invested: $30,000 Sale price: $350,000 SFH - Long term hold

The appraisals that consisting come in close to what a property actually sells for are where the subject is an income producing  property being run on a consistently and providing consistent cash flow.