Having student loans should increase your credit, not hurt it, assuming you actually paid them when you were supposed to.One of the easiest ways to boost your credit (beyond beginning to pay what you owe), is to go and pull your free credit report (I believe it is https://www.annualcreditreport.com/).

increase your limits every few months, this has the added benefit to reduce your utilization.  

Through these two events plus and enormous rabbit hole tumble into real estate advise books like the ones on this website (thanks again Brandon) along with an avalanche of YouTube videos and other business self help books like “The 4-Hour Work Week” I’ve developed the confidence and put in place the systems to help pull the trigger on my first two buy and hold rental property deals.

So if I am successful in buying first thing that would happen would be to increase rents to current values.  

That's a rental rate increase for anyone's portfolio down there.

But everyone has differnt goals so to one person a 6 cap might look good because they're doing a value-add and want to increase IRR to 30% in a couple years and throw a couple hundred k at it. 

While researching it, the rent for the units have increased to $850.

By renovating the unoccupied unit I was able to increase the value of the property What was the outcome?

If it's already updated, there will probably be little opportunity to add value and the seller will be less likely to accept a lower price.That being said, when you're less than 1%, the numbers get increasingly difficult.

I see more people want a fixer so that they can make improvements to the place and increase equity, and then get stuck when they realize that they don’t have the cash resources to do the work.