That's a great path to growth.A few things that may be helpful to you here on the Bigger Pockets website as you search for a team to support your first buy:You can set up keyword alerts so anytime someone posts about the market or specific neighborhoods you're exploring, you'll be notified.

So just because the appraisal supports your price, doesn't mean you could resell for that the next day. 

Some investors disregard these rules and buy and sell using market conditions.To be more specific as to your thread, Duplexes and even Triplexes don't generally genereate enough cash flow and I'd stay away from them.

There are a lot more rules than I covered here in this post but double check everything against the handbook.

Anything smaller and the apartment cant support it.

But no one says "it's our own internal rule," they say "it's Fannie Mae's fault!"

Running my numbers on the refinance, here is what I think I was seeing (and please feel free to comment on any of the assumptions I used, as I don't have a lot of data to support my estimates).Appraised value estimated to be $141,000, and knowing I can finance up to 80% of that, I could realistic pull out up to $112,800. 

We both have pretty demanding jobs, so a highly involved project might be out of scope for us but I won’t rule out fix and flip and BRRR.

I will add that while neither was purchased with the knowledge and full analysis of being an income producing property, the area is strong enough to support the homes as such, and we will even be able to have a (very) small cash flow within the first year. 

As a result of becoming a landlord I am less supportive of certain social programs now then I used to be,  I like dogs less, and I am now skeptical of anyone who says they are "disabled.