Hi all and thanks in advance for your feedback.  What advice would you give a new investor looking to find out of state opportunities?  How would you go about narrowing down the country if your plan was to find a prop...

If you know that the 1% purchase: rent ratio is a good investment, then you can quickly evaluate a large number of homes to see which ones to investigate further.

My current status is I'm working w/ an architect on draft plans and will hopefully be going to a preliminary planning approval session soon.

I'm investigating the Cincinatti real estate market and would like to pay the city a visit in the next few weeks looking to build a network , to look at a few smaller multi-family properties and in general understand the city better than pure Internet search allows.I was wondering if perhaps a real estate agent from Cincinatti that's also reading this forum would be willing to help me out with learning about the market and looking at properties.

You can share why you think my opinion stinks and the OP can investigate and then make an educated decision.

Other functions MAY be lend themselves to being able to be done in tandem "out of order" (like commissioning a full set of construction documents before preliminary approvals are in hand).

You will need to pay for a title search ($45-$50) for each property you are investigating. 

Therefore, I investigated a way to utilize calculated risk to develop cash flow options that we could utilize in retirement in addition to our traditional investment portfolio.

Looking to build a long term relationship with with availability of checking & savings account and financing to purchase properties.Have looked into several but can only tell so much from research and preliminary discussions to open an account.

Sounds like your sitework will be expensive, have you had any preliminary discussions with planners, or engineers - higher density will offset that cost and create better margins.