However, as the owner you still need to spend more than 50% of personal services and more than 750 hours on the real estate business on your own.Alternatively, short-term rentals are generally treated as active business income and therefore are eligible to offset w-2 income.Navigating the Real Estate Professional Rules"When measuring material participation, a married taxpayer is required to count any hours performed by his or her spouse, even if the spouse does not own an interest in the business or if no joint return is filed.32 While this rule is advantageous because it makes it more likely the taxpayer materially participates in the real property trade or business, it is a trap for the unwary in the real estate professional context, as discussed below in Step 3.""

During this process the late payment got reported to collections and I shortly after completed the payment.

this could be a good solution but you should still at least break even with LTRs as a backup plan. note that even a breakeven deal is only breakeven for a short time. rents go up, mortgage goes down. you could also start looking offmarket!

Here's a short list of things to consider when looking at lower priced properties:What condition is it in?

I do my fair share of phone calls and networking but every year I have manage to come across a deal so large my brain starts to fume.  Few years ago it was a multi-state portfolio spread across 5 states. last year it ...

You can reach out to your local (state) Self Storage Association, peruse topics on You Tube, and certainly many, many forums here on Biggerpockets with quality folks & quality content.Regardless, of how you piece your learning together, everything (soup to nuts) for an Acquisition is either FINDING a lead, EVALUATING to determine if it's a deal, now you're in the PURCHASING phase, and after you close, now it's all about MANAGING.If you think that at times it makes more sense to build than to buy, then you'll want to learn about Development & Conversions.  

I had a short term rental but NY laws put an end to that.

- Short Sale/Sales Team, Rehab Team, etc with multiple WILLING people! 

And then eventually we'd like to get some short term rentals in a few ideal places around the country that we can have occasionally for personal use.Oh, and the student loan debt.

I would love to learn enough to be able to lead a syndication one day.