I’ve been a realtor for 11 years and the past 4 years I’ve been with the same brokerage.I work on a nationwide investor-friendly team, (teaching agents to become investor-friendly and to become investors themselves).Working with investors allows you to work with fewer clients and do more deals.

The Zestimate for my personal residence is 30k lower than one of my direct neighbors despite the neighbor's home having fewer bedrooms and bathrooms and being 800 sf smaller.

For example, I could put the entire $215k towards larger down payment on fewer properties, and thus keep reserve needs lower, but I’m uncertain if I will get the $1500/month cash flow desired.

Tenants will have 3 options to by-pass security deposits:  1) Apartment security deposit insurance, which may range from $3 to $20 a month paid during the duration of the rental, depending on the monthly rent. 2) Installment plans, which would be paid over no fewer than six months. 3) Payment of a smaller security deposit, which must be less than 50% of the first month’s rent. 

Not so intense in its frequency that it consumes people's busy lives but also frequent enough to continue to feed people information and keep momentum going.

In many jurisdictions, you must separately meter the utilities if you want tenants to pay for them directly or you risk violating consumer protection laws.    

They pull all of their data from public records so I've found that there are usually 3-4 different phone numbers for each lead, which can make prospecting a little tedious and time consuming.

And now we are taking steps to slowly bring it up from there which has been more time consuming.

Be careful about the way you talk about financial things and give fewer details if you do not want people’s opposite viewpoints.

However to support Steve's point of view, it could be argued that when starting out the fewer regs. you need to learn the better, and you can learn section 8 later.